Blue Origin is aiming for a late February launch of its New Glenn heavy-lift rocket, carrying a commercial satellite for AST SpaceMobile into low-Earth orbit, the company said, marking the third flight of the vehicle after more than a decade in development.<\/p>\n
The mission will be the second time Blue Origin, founded by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, has flown a commercial payload aboard New Glenn. Earlier plans had suggested the rocket could instead be used to launch the company\u2019s own robotic lunar lander, Blue Moon Mark 1, but that spacecraft is currently being shipped to NASA\u2019s Johnson Space Center in Texas for thermal vacuum testing, and no launch date has been announced.<\/p>\n
The company did not immediately explain the change in mission focus. New Glenn\u2019s upcoming flight will reuse the booster from its second mission in November, which was successfully recovered after landing on a drone ship at sea, mirroring recovery techniques long used by SpaceX.<\/p>\n
The launch is expected to take place during a crowded period for spaceflight. NASA may fly its Artemis II mission, sending four astronauts around the moon, as early as Feb. 6, while SpaceX is preparing further tests of its Starship rocket and is scheduled to launch the Crew-12 mission to the International Space Station later in the month.<\/p>\n
New Glenn is designed to routinely carry payloads to orbit and beyond, building on Blue Origin\u2019s experience with its New Shepard suborbital rocket, which has flown for more than a decade. Blue Origin has signed agreements with AST SpaceMobile for multiple launches to support the company\u2019s planned space-based cellular broadband network.<\/p>\n
Beyond New Glenn, Blue Origin is pursuing broader ambitions. In November, the company unveiled plans for a super-heavy version of the rocket, comparable in size to SpaceX\u2019s Starship, and earlier this week announced a satellite internet constellation called TeraWave, with deployments planned to begin in late 2027.<\/p>\n
Blue Origin has also said it intends to deploy its Blue Moon landers on future lunar and Mars missions and is developing Blue Ring, a spacecraft designed to host and deploy payloads for other space companies.<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Blue Origin is aiming for a late February launch of its New Glenn heavy-lift rocket, carrying a commercial satellite for AST SpaceMobile into low-Earth orbit, the company said, marking the third flight of the vehicle after more than a decade in development. The mission will be the second time Blue Origin, founded by Amazon founder […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[5797,575,509,5786,1046,5744,510,1250,5812,4362,5871,5841],"class_list":["post-20893","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-aerospace-industry","tag-ast-spacemobile","tag-blue-origin","tag-commercial-spaceflight","tag-jeff-bezos","tag-low-earth-orbit","tag-new-glenn","tag-new-shepard","tag-north-america","tag-satellite-internet","tag-space-launch","tag-united-states"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20893"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20893"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20893\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20893"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20893"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20893"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}