Blue Origin’s New Glenn put a customer satellite in the wrong orbit during its third launch

Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin successfully re-used one of its New Glenn rockets for the first time ever on Sunday, but the company failed at its primary mission: delivering a communications satellite to orbit for customer AST SpaceMobile.

AST SpaceMobile issued a statement Sunday afternoon that the upper stage of the New Glenn rocket placed BlueBird 7 satellite into an orbit that was “lower than planned.” The satellite successfully separated from the rocket and powered on, the company said, but the altitude is too low “to sustain operations” and will now have to be de-orbited — left to burn up in the atmosphere of Earth.

The cost of the loss of the satellite is covered by AST SpaceMobile’s insurance policy, according the company, and there are successive BlueBird satellites that will be completed in around a month. AST SpaceMobile has contracts with more than just Blue Origin, and the company said it expects to be able to launch 45 more to space by the end of 2026.

But this represents the first major failure for Blue Origin’s New Glenn program, which only made its first flight in January 2025 after more than a decade in development. This was the second mission where New Glenn carried a customer payload to space, after launching twin spacecraft bound for Mars on behalf of NASA last November. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The apparent failure of New Glenn’s second stage could have wider implications beyond Blue Origin’s near-term commercial ambitions. The company is pushing hard to become one of the main launch providers for NASA’s Artemis missions to the moon and beyond. The space agency — and the Trump administration — has put pressure on Blue Origin and SpaceX to be able to put landers on the moon by the end of President Donald Trump’s second term, before advancing to returning humans to the lunar surface.

Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp has even said his company “will move heaven and Earth” to help NASA get back to the moon faster.

Blue Origin recently completed testing its first version of its own lunar lander, which the company is expected to try and launch at some point this year (without any crew). Blue Origin had suggested last year that it was considering launching this lander on New Glenn’s third mission, but ultimately decided to launch the AST SpaceMobile satellite instead.

The third New Glenn launch seemed to start just fine on Sunday, with the the mega-rocket lifting off at 7:35 a.m. local time from Cape Canaveral, Florida. It was the first time Blue Origin re-used a previously-flown New Glenn booster — the same one that flew during New Glenn’s second mission. Roughly 10 minutes after liftoff, the booster came back down and landed on a drone ship in the ocean, just like it had last November. Jeff Bezos even shared drone footage of the booster’s landing on X, the social media site owned by his rival Elon Musk. (Musk offered congratulations.)

Roughly two hours after the launch, though, Blue Origin announced in its own post that the New Glenn upper stage placed AST SpaceMobile satellite in an “off-nominal orbit.” The company has not released any more information since that post.

Blue Origin spent a long time developing New Glenn, and it has been taken as a sign of confidence in that process that the company decided to start launching commercial payloads during these early missions. By comparison, SpaceX has spent the last few years flying test versions of its massive Starship, but has stuck with using dummy payloads as it works out the rocket’s kinks.

SpaceX did lose payloads deeper into its Falcon 9 program. In 2015, on the 19th Falcon 9 mission, the rocket blew up mid-flight and lost an entire International Space Station cargo spacecraft. In 2016, a Falcon 9 exploded on the launch pad during testing, causing the loss of an internet satellite for Meta.