Blue Origin is scheduled for the third launch of its giant rocket, New Glenn, in late February. But it won’t be heading to the moon, as the company has previously hinted. Instead, the rocket will carry a satellite into low Earth orbit for AST SpaceMobile, marking the second time Jeff Bezos’ space company has flown a commercial payload with New Glenn.
The company did not immediately explain why it chose to launch the AST SpaceMobile satellite rather than its own robotic lunar lander. The lander, known as Blue Moon Mark 1 (MK1), is currently being transported to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Texas for vacuum chamber testing. The launch date for the mission has not been determined.
Still, this will be the third New Glenn launch in just over a year, after a decade spent developing the rocket.
The launch will take place during a busy month for spaceflight. NASA could launch the Artemis II mission with four astronauts in orbit around the moon as early as February 6. SpaceX is expected to begin testing a third version of its Starship rocket. NASA and SpaceX are scheduled to launch the Crew-12 mission, which will help return the International Space Station to full staff after the Crew-11 team was medically evacuated earlier this month.
For this launch, Blue Origin will reuse the booster stage from New Glenn’s second mission last November. The company did what SpaceX has done for years with its Falcon 9 boosters, landing the boosters on a drone ship at sea and recovering them.
New Glenn is Blue Origin’s first vehicle intended to routinely transport payloads into Earth orbit and beyond, and is based on a suborbital rocket program called New Shepard that has been in operation for more than a decade. The company has signed an agreement with AST SpaceMobile to send multiple satellites into orbit to help build a space-based mobile broadband network.
But New Glenn is just one part of the company’s grand ambitions. In November, the company announced the super-heavy New Glenn rocket, which is taller than the Saturn V rocket and comparable to SpaceX’s Starship. And on Wednesday, the company announced a satellite internet constellation called TeraWave that it plans to begin deploying in late 2027.
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The company also hopes to use the Blue Moon lander for missions to the Moon and Mars, and is developing another spacecraft called Blue Ring that can host and deploy payloads from other space companies.
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