Blue Origin has successfully reused its first stage New Glenn booster for the first time after landing in a cloud of smoke and fire on a recovery ship. It symbolizes second flight and reuse never tell me the possibilitiesAfter the booster was recovered from New Glenn’s previous launch in November last year. However, the rocket company’s first commercial mission was interrupted by a failure to place the communications satellite payload into orbit.
The launch started smoothly, with the first stage’s GS1 booster separating from New Glenn after three minutes and landing smoothly 10 minutes after launch after two braking burns, as shown in a post on X from Blue Origin boss Jeff Bezos.
However, several hours later the Blue Origin team and the satellite’s manufacturer, AST Spacemobile, announced that the payload had failed to reach orbit. “We have confirmed payload separation,” Blue Origin announced on the X.
In a later press release, AST Spacemobile revealed that “the satellite separated from the launch vehicle and turned on, [but] Height [was] Too little to maintain operations with its on-board thruster technology and it would de-orbit. The cost of the satellite is expected to be recovered under the company’s insurance policy.
The upper stage was to place the satellite into a 285-mile orbit after completing two burns. It will then unfurl a 2,400-square-foot antenna and pair with six other satellites in a test of AST’s high-speed direct-to-cell network. However, initial telemetry data showed that the satellite only reached a range of 95 miles, far below a stable orbit. It is not yet clear how the failure occurred.
Despite this, Blue Origin can take some solace from the successful reuse of its first stage, especially since it happened on just the third New Glenn mission (NG-3). By comparison, it took SpaceX 32 flights before its first successful flight of a previously flown orbital-class booster.
Blue Origin would definitely like to resolve the upper stage issue soon. Its next flight is the first New Glenn launch of the Amazon LEO (formerly Project Kuiper) broadband satellites. It plans to put 48 of them into orbit to significantly expand the constellation of the Starlink rival, which currently has 241 satellites.
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