Oops: Blue Origin's New Glenn Put Customer's Satellite in the Wrong Orbit

In the third launch of its larger New Glenn rocket, and the first time Blue Origin had attempted to re-use a booster, it failed to place its payload into an effective orbit. Now, the satellite will need to be de-orbited, TechCrunch reports. Although the company in question has many more satellites planned for launch this year, and the loss will be covered by insurance, this comes at a terrible time for Blue Origin, which is gunning hard for the NASA contract to take humans back to the Moon in future Artemis missions.
Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket has been in development for over a decade, but it only had its first launch test in 2025. While it failed to land the booster on that attempt, the second test in November succeeded, showcasing the rocket’s impressive lift capacity as it sent several payloads into orbit. However, in this third launch (and the first mission for a private customer), New Glenn failed to meet its mission parameters—even though the booster was successfully recovered.
The client in this case was AST SpaceMobile, which had contracted Blue Origin to send one of its BlueBird 7 satellites into orbit. Although it successfully separated from the rocket, it was in a “lower than planned” orbit, meaning the satellite cannot complete its main task and will be deorbited. Still, AST SpaceMobile will launch as many as 45 of these satellites in 2026, leveraging Blue Origin and other launch providers.
However, the effect on Blue Origin and New Glenn’s reputations could be more problematic. The company is pushing hard to compete with SpaceX for the Artemis Moon return missions, with its Blue Moon Mark 1 cargo lander proposed as a potential crewed lander after some modifications, followed by Mark 2. With SpaceX’s Starship HLS requiring unproven refueling technologies and even reaching effective orbit, there’s real potential for Blue Origin to undercut the longstanding NASA contractor.
But not with failures to get payloads into the correct orbit. It’s not clear why that happened, but everything seemed to go well with the first-stage booster, which was recovered, so it may be reusable in the future. It’s possible then that the second stage failed to deliver enough thrust to get the satellite into an effective orbit. We’ll need to wait for Blue Origin’s post-mortem to know for sure.
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