In another humiliating blow to Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, the Federal Aviation Administration has grounded Blue Origin’s massive New Glenn rocket following a spectacular mishap during its third flight.
The rocket successfully launched from Cape Canaveral on Sunday, April 19, and the booster even stuck the landing like a pro, but the upper stage completely botched the most critical part: putting a multi-million-dollar commercial satellite into the correct orbit.
The satellite is now a total loss, with its onboard thrusters unable to save it. It will deorbit and burn up in a fiery reentry.
The New Glenn rocket lifted off on Sunday without major issues, and its first-stage booster successfully landed on a drone ship, marking a technical achievement for Blue Origin. However, the payload — a communications satellite built by AST SpaceMobile — was placed into the wrong orbit, making it unusable.
The satellite, known as BlueBird 7, was intended to support direct-to-cellphone broadband service. Instead, it was deployed into a much lower orbit than planned, leaving it without enough propulsion to reach operational altitude. The satellite is expected to reenter Earth’s atmosphere and be destroyed.
The lost payload represents a financial setback worth hundreds of millions of dollars and sent the company’s stock (NASDAQ: ASTS) lower on Monday. AST SpaceMobile is competing with firms including SpaceX and Amazon in the satellite communications market.
The FAA wasted no time slapping a “mishap” label on the mission and ordering a full investigation. New Glenn is now grounded indefinitely until Blue Origin and the feds sort out what went wrong with the second-stage engines.
In a statement on Monday, Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp wrote on X:
“Now that we have a more complete view, we wanted to provide an update on our NG-3 mission. While we are pleased with the nominal booster recovery, we clearly didn’t deliver the mission our customer wanted, and our team expects.
Early data suggest that on our second GS2 burn, one of the BE-3U engines didn’t produce sufficient thrust to reach our target orbit.
Source: The Gateway Pundit
