Partial success for the New Glenn flight, the mega rocket from Blue Origin, billionaire Jeff Bezos’s space company.
On the occasion of the third launch of the New Glenn rocket on April 19, the company founded by Bezos confirmed the ability to reuse the booster: the stage landed correctly. However, the satellite carried was not placed into the planned orbit. The mission represents a significant milestone in the competition between Blue Origin and SpaceX, the aerospace company of American billionaire Elon Musk.
As highlighted by Reuters, the third flight of New Glenn took place during a period of intense activity in the space sector, which includes the success of NASA’s Artemis II lunar flyby. The next Artemis mission, scheduled for next year, will test the landing systems developed by Blue Origin and SpaceX in Earth orbit.
“New Glenn is the vehicle that can take NASA, or anyone else, anywhere in the solar system,” says Laura Maginnis, vice president of the New Glenn mission.
Not to mention that Blue Origin aims to compete directly with SpaceX in the transport of commercial, military, and scientific satellites both in Earth orbit and deep space, also planning the deployment of Amazon Leo, a constellation of satellites for Internet connectivity owned by Amazon, designed to compete with Starlink, Musk’s satellite Internet service.
THE RECOVERY OF THE BOOSTER “NEVER TELL ME THE ODDS”
At 7:25 local time in Cape Canaveral, Florida, the powerful Blue Origin rocket took off and after about ten minutes, the first stage began its return, landing on the Jacklyn sea platform in the Atlantic Ocean, successfully completing the reentry and landing phase, confirming the recovery system’s capability.
The booster, nicknamed “Never Tell Me the Odds,” had already accomplished the same feat last November during New Glenn’s second flight, NG-2, albeit with a different engine configuration.
THE FAILURE TO PLACE THE BLUEBIRD 7 SATELLITE INTO ORBIT
However, several hours later, the Blue Origin team and the satellite manufacturer, AST SpaceMobile, announced that the payload – the BlueBird 7 direct-to-cell phone communications satellite – had failed to reach orbit. “We confirmed payload separation,” Blue Origin announced on X. “AST SpaceMobile confirmed satellite ignition. The payload was inserted into an anomalous orbit.”
The satellite was part of a project aimed at creating a broadband space cellular network, similar to systems developed by Amazon and SpaceX with Starlink.
JEFF BEZOS’S SPACE RACE WITH ELON MUSK
Furthermore, the reuse of the booster for NG-3 was only partial, as the largest component of the stage, the BE-4 engines, was new.
“Nonetheless, Blue Origin can take comfort in the success of reusing the first stage, especially considering it happened on the third mission with the New Glenn rocket (NG-3),” comments Engadget. SpaceX, by comparison, took 32 flights before successfully reusing an orbital booster previously flown.
According to the outlet, Bezos’s company led by Dave Limp will surely want to quickly resolve the upper stage issue. Its next flight is the first launch with the New Glenn rocket of the Amazon Leo broadband satellites.
MAKING UP GROUND ON SPACEX
Reuse is crucial for Blue Origin to increase launch cadence and meet the demand from AST SpaceMobile and other customers, although the company has provided few launch forecasts, notes Spacenews.
“We are evaluating increasing our resources, our equipment, our processes, obviously leveraging the excellent systems engineering and innovation we have implemented in the system to enable us to scale very quickly at this stage,” said Laura Maginnis, vice president of New Glenn mission management at Blue Origin, on March 24 at the Satellite 2026 conference.
“Market demand, as everyone has stated, is significant and we are excited to be able to meet it,” Maginnis added, without providing an estimate of the number of launches the company will conduct this year.
“We developed New Glenn thinking about how we imagine space will be in 50 to 100 years,” said Jordan Charles, vice president of the program.
As already mentioned, the launch fits into a phase of growing competition between Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk in space. The two companies are engaged in developing technologies for NASA’s future lunar missions, aiming to return humans to the Moon before China’s crewed mission planned for 2030.
SpaceX is developing a landing system based on Starship, while Blue Origin is working on the Blue Moon module and plans an uncrewed lunar landing, Mark 1, during the summer.
The result of New Glenn’s third flight thus highlights progress on the reuse front, but also issues still to be resolved by Blue Origin for the full success of commercial launches, while the direct competition with SpaceX continues in developing future space capabilities.
