By David Shepardson and Steve Gorman
WASHINGTON, April 20 (Reuters) – Federal aviation regulators on Monday ordered billionaire Jeff Bezos’ space company, Blue Origin, to investigate the upper-stage malfunction of its New Glenn rocket during a failed weekend satellite launch from Florida.
Sunday’s mishap, coming on the third flight of the towering orbital launch vehicle and its second for a paying customer, posed a setback in Blue Origin’s quest to compete on a more equal footing with Elon Musk’s SpaceX, the world’s leading rocket-launch service.
Under the Federal Aviation Administration’s directive, Blue Origin is required to conduct a mishap inquiry and obtain agency approval of its final report and any corrective actions before it can resume flying the powerful two-stage New Glenn.
The FAA must determine that no system, process or procedure related to the mishap poses a public safety hazard.
The reusable lower-stage rocket booster blasted off successfully from Cape Canaveral on Sunday morning and made it back to Earth for a safe return landing. But the upper stage failed to deliver its payload, an AST SpaceMobile communications satellite, to its correct orbit.
The satellite was released into space, though at an insufficient orbital altitude.
The FAA order referred to an unspecified “mishap” experienced by New Glenn 3 during its “second-stage flight sequence.”
Early data suggests that one of the two BE-3U engines that power the upper stage after separation from the rocket’s lower-stage booster “didn’t produce sufficient thrust to reach our target orbit,” Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp in a statement posted on X on Monday.
“Blue Origin is leading the anomaly investigation with FAA oversight to learn from the data and implement the improvements needed to quickly return to flight operations,” he added.
AST’s ill-fated BlueBird 7 satellite re-entered the atmosphere on Monday, according to Harvard-Smithsonian astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell, who tracks space objects for the American Astronomical Society, and presumably burned up harmlessly over the Earth.
The BlueBird 7 was part of an effort to build a space-based cellular broadband network similar to Amazon’s Leo system or SpaceX’s Starlink constellation. It was designed to connect directly with smartphones.
Blue Origin, founded by Bezos in 2000, was until recent years known mainly for flying celebrities and other wealthy passengers to the edge of space and back in its suborbital New Shepard rocketship.
The company announced in January, however, that it was halting its space tourism business for a least two years to focus more on commercial launch services and building a moon lander for NASA.
Sunday’s mission was a key test of the 29-story-tall, heavy-lift New Glenn rocket in its bid to compete with the SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket.
The same lower-stage booster, dubbed Never Tell Me the Odds (a reference to a line spoken by “Star Wars” hero Han Solo in the film “The Empire Strikes Back”) previously flew in the launch vehicle’s second mission, in November 2025, sending two NASA satellites toward Mars.
The booster recovery succeeded in November, too, though the first try with New Glenn’s debut test flight in January of last year failed. The rocket is named for John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth.
Sunday’s New Glenn 3 followed a series of delays this month amid a surge of activity in the space sector, including the successful NASA Artemis II lunar flyby that took a crew of four astronauts more than 252,000 miles from Earth, farther than any humans had traveled before.
(Reporting by David Shepardson in Washington and Steve Gorman in Los Angeles, Editing by Franklin Paul and David Gregorio)
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