Blue Origin's rocket reuse achievement marred by upper stage failure

The third flight of Blue Origin’s heavy-lift New Glenn launcher began Sunday with the company’s first successful reflight of an orbital-class booster, but ended with a setback for Jeff Bezos’ flagship rocket, a key element in NASA’s Artemis lunar program. The 321-foot-tall (98-meter) New Glenn launch vehicle ignited its seven methane-fueled BE-4 engines at 7:25 am EDT (11:25 UTC) Sunday, beginning a slow climb from its launch pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. The main engines, each producing more than a half-million pounds of thrust, accelerated the rocket past the speed of sound in about a minute-and-a-half. Three minutes into the flight, the booster switched off its engines and fell away from New Glenn’s upper stage, powered by two BE-3U engines burning liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. New Glenn’s first stage continued a downrange parabolic arc, briefly soaring into space before guiding itself toward Blue Origin’s landing platform in the Atlantic Ocean nearly 400 miles southeast of Cape Canaveral. Reigniting its engines for two braking burns, the booster settled onto the ship for a smoky but on-target touchdown less than 10 minutes after liftoff. The landing marked the end of the second flight for this booster, named Never Tell Me The Odds, after debuting with a good launch and recovery on Blue Origin’s previous New Glenn mission in November. Blue Origin, founded and owned by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, has landed and reused its smaller New Shepard suborbital booster numerous times, but New Glenn surpasses New Shepard in difficulty and scale. It flies higher, travels faster, and is three times the height of the New Shepard. Technicians installed new engines on the booster for Sunday’s flight, but the Blue Origin intends to reuse the engines from the November launch on future New Glenn missions, according to Dave Limp, the company’s CEO. New Glenn allows Blue Origin to reach into a broader market for launches to low-Earth orbit and beyond. SpaceX has shown it can recycle a Falcon 9 booster for reflight in just nine days, and launch Falcon 9s five or more times in one week using a fleet of reusable boosters and three active launch pads. Blue Origin officials expect reusing New Glenn boosters will unlock a vastly faster launch rate for themselves. Upper stages have been a menace for other rockets of late. SpaceX suffered upper stage failures on three test flights of the massive Starship rocket last year. Second stage problems are responsible for the only blemishes in SpaceX’s near-perfect reliability record with the workhorse Falcon 9 rocket. For SpaceX, these are the only pieces of the Falcon 9 and Starship that haven’t been recovered, inspected, and reused. The company said it expects to have the next three BlueBird satellites ready to ship to their launch site in about 30 days, and it anticipates having approximately 45 satellites in orbit by the end of 2026. In January, AST projected somewhere between 45 and 60 satellites in orbit by the end of the year. Failures such as Sunday’s are not unusual as new rockets come online. United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket has reached orbit on all four of its missions to date, but two of the flights survived close calls after malfunctions in their solid-fueled strap-on boosters. After three successful flights, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 stranded a satellite in an unusable orbit on its fourth launch in 2012. The incidents triggered months-long investigations before the rockets flew again. An investigation of similar length would delay Blue Origin’s next batch of New Glenn flights, which include launches for the Amazon Leo broadband constellation and, most visibly, the launch of the company’s first prototype Blue Moon lander to the Moon. Any schedule slip for Blue Moon is bad news for NASA, which plans to use a human-rated version of Blue Moon to ferry astronauts to and from the lunar surface on future Artemis missions. NASA has contracts with Blue Origin and SpaceX to develop landers to land astronauts on the Moon before the end of 2028. Amazon is already dealing with launch reliability woes as its main launch contractor, United Launch Alliance, investigates the Vulcan rocket’s persistent solid rocket booster problem. A successful test of the first Blue Moon Mark 1 would demonstrate the spacecraft’s engine, structures, and avionics, and grow confidence that Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket is up to the task of reliably and precisely launching additional Blue Moon landers for NASA’s Artemis program. NASA is closely watching advancements by the agency’s Moon lander contractors after the nearly flawless Artemis II mission around the Moon earlier this month. SpaceX plans to launch the first suborbital test flight of its upgraded Starship Version 3 rocket, itself a prototype for a future Artemis lunar lander, as soon as May. Updated at 2:45 pm EDT (18:45 UTC) with AST SpaceMobile statement.