For the first time, Blue Origin has successfully landed its New Glenn booster rocket, which had been flown on a prior mission, but the satellite payload that came with it was shunted into an incorrect orbit.
The launch marked a technical milestone for Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ space firm, with Blue Origin now only the second company, after SpaceX, to land a booster that had been used in another launch.
But New Glenn’s upper stage placed a satellite from AST SpaceMobile into a lower-than-planned orbit. While the satellite separated from the launch vehicle and powered on, the altitude is too low to sustain operations with its on-board thruster technology and will de-orbited.
The mixed results show that Blue Origin is still trailing behind its biggest rival SpaceX, even if the mission did demonstrate that it can now reuse parts of rockets that are capable of placing payloads into orbit.
Blue Origin is currently contracted for major components of Nasa’s Artemis missions to the Moon. This weekend...