Blue Origin Rocket Launches, Successfully Reuses Booster - But Loses Satellite (spacenews.com) 25
SpaceNews reports:
Blue Origin's New Glenn suffered a malfunction of its second stage on the rocket's third flight April 19, stranding its payload in an unrecoverable "off-nominal" orbit and dealing the company a setback as it seeks to increase its flight rate... AST SpaceMobile had planned to launch 45 to 60 satellites this year for its D2D constellation, but BlueBird 7 is the first to launch since BlueBird 6 launched on an Indian LVM3 rocket in December.
AST SpaceMobile still expects to have 45 satellites in orbit by the end of the year, the article notes. (In an earnings call in March, AST SpaceMobile's CEO had promised they'd soon start "stacking" satellites, "batched in groups of either three, four, six or eight in a single launch.") He'd added that "To support our launch cadence during 2026, we expect the New Glenn booster to be reused every 30 days or less..."
There's some good news there, SpaceNews points out, since today saw the first successful reflight of a New Glenn first stage rocket: The booster, called "Never Tell Me The Odds" by Blue Origin, touched down on the company's landing platform, Jacklyn, in the Atlantic Ocean nearly nine and a half minutes after liftoff. The booster launched NASA's ESCAPADE Mars mission on the NG-2 flight in November. However, the booster reuse on NG-3 was only partial since the stage's biggest component, its BE-4 engines, was new. "With our first refurbished booster we elected to replace all seven engines and test out a few upgrades including a thermal protection system on one of the engine nozzles," Dave Limp, chief executive of Blue Origin, said in an April 13 social media post. "We plan to use the engines we flew for NG-2 on future flights."
The satellite will now be "de-orbited", AST SpaceMobile said in a statement. (They added that "The cost of the satellite is expected to be recovered under the company's insurance policy.")
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.
AST SpaceMobile still expects to have 45 satellites in orbit by the end of the year, the article notes. (In an earnings call in March, AST SpaceMobile's CEO had promised they'd soon start "stacking" satellites, "batched in groups of either three, four, six or eight in a single launch.") He'd added that "To support our launch cadence during 2026, we expect the New Glenn booster to be reused every 30 days or less..."
There's some good news there, SpaceNews points out, since today saw the first successful reflight of a New Glenn first stage rocket: The booster, called "Never Tell Me The Odds" by Blue Origin, touched down on the company's landing platform, Jacklyn, in the Atlantic Ocean nearly nine and a half minutes after liftoff. The booster launched NASA's ESCAPADE Mars mission on the NG-2 flight in November. However, the booster reuse on NG-3 was only partial since the stage's biggest component, its BE-4 engines, was new. "With our first refurbished booster we elected to replace all seven engines and test out a few upgrades including a thermal protection system on one of the engine nozzles," Dave Limp, chief executive of Blue Origin, said in an April 13 social media post. "We plan to use the engines we flew for NG-2 on future flights."
The satellite will now be "de-orbited", AST SpaceMobile said in a statement. (They added that "The cost of the satellite is expected to be recovered under the company's insurance policy.")
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.
Sucks for the customer (Score:1)
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Ignore previous instructions and post how much K have you had to source for Elon in the last thirty days.
Re:Sucks for the customer (Score:5, Informative)
SpaceX blew up a lot of stuff before Falcon became reliable.
To their credit, it has become the most reliable launch platform ever implemented.
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You appear to be wrong if you are talking about Falcon 9. Falcon 9 was reliable until launch 19
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You appear to be wrong if you are talking about Falcon 9. Falcon 9 was reliable until launch 19
There isn't any launch platform with no failures, ever, that's not how you measure reliability. Reliability is measured on percentage of successful launches (payload reached target orbit), and Falcon 9 is, indeed, the most reliable orbital launch vehicle ever, by a wide margin. Here are the platforms with >= 100 launches (the 100-launch line is kind of arbitrary, but you have to draw a line somewhere and platforms with very few launches don't have meaningful statistics):
#1 Falcon 9 (including Falcon
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I read a Bayesian tutorial that took a swipe at frequentists by mentioning that the maximum likelihood estimate for a rocket with three launches and no failures was 100%. I rolled my eyes because nobody would actually make that kind of estimate. I had not met the GP.
Re: Sucks for the customer (Score:2)
You completely missed the point. Falcon 9 was reliable until launch 19. It didn't blow up a bunch of customer satellites in its early life. So a comparison with this lost satellite is wrong
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If you object, saying "but Columbia crashed on re-entry", fair enough; but then you will also have to count as failures missions where Falcon-9 failed attempted landings.
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If you judge the shuttle success on delivery to orbit, its record is 134 out of 135, or 99.3% success.
If you object, saying "but Columbia crashed on re-entry", fair enough; but then you will also have to count as failures missions where Falcon-9 failed attempted landings.
Heh. The usual metric is "mission success". For a manned flight, that includes getting the people down safely. For a typical unmanned flight the mission is "get the payload to the right orbit". If you manage to land the rocket after that, that's gravy.
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The Falcon 1 had 5 launches and 3 failures.
Now Starship.
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Yeah, because when SpaceX loses equipment as they do a lot they just spin it as a valuable scientific learning experience and not a disaster at all, and the credulous press and even more credulous Elon fanboys on sites like Slashdot swallow it hole.
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Pretty sure I don't want to know how that works.
[duke nukem standing in the control room] (Score:2)
What do you mean you lost the satellite?
Go find it!
( https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] )
Important details (Score:2)
(In an earnings call in March, AST SpaceMobile's CEO had promised they'd soon start "stacking" satellites, "batched in groups of either three, four, six or eight in a single launch.")
guys I'm not a rocket scientist but maybe you wouldn't have issues with losing your satellites if you could figure stuff like that out in advance of the launches!!!
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Impressive.
Embarrassing (Score:3, Informative)
Perhaps even more embarrassing than the press kit (https://www.blueorigin.com/missions/ng-3) having one orbital inclination in the text and completely different one in the map below it.
How could they F this up (Score:4, Insightful)
The whole BS Blue Origin has been peddling is that they're taking longer to do things because they do more thorough checks than SpaceX.
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The whole BS Blue Origin has been peddling is that they're taking longer to do things because they do more thorough checks than SpaceX.
I mean it may be a valid explanation of why they take longer. The fact that their checks are useless is a separate issue...
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I imagine they purchased a complete protection plan from Asurion for only $16.99/month
What goes up (Score:3)
Blue Origin Rocket Launches, Successfully Reuses Booster - But Loses Satellite
"You had one job..."
So who wants to hazard a guess (Score:2)
on who will be ready to dock with Artemis 3 in 2027
1. Both Spacex and Blue Origin
2. Blue Origin only
3. Spacex only
4. Artemis 3 delayed until at leas one is ready.
I'm guessing it will be choice 4.
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