Overview
- The New Glenn rocket launched from Cape Canaveral at 7:25 a.m. ET Sunday carrying AST SpaceMobile’s BlueBird 7, and its first stage landed on the Jacklyn drone ship about 10 minutes later.
- An upper-stage anomaly left the satellite in a lower-than-planned orbit that AST SpaceMobile says is unusable, so it will be deorbited with the loss covered by insurance.
- Blue Origin confirmed payload separation and power-on and said it is assessing the off-nominal orbit, with details on the root cause still pending.
- The flight marked the first reflight and sea recovery of a New Glenn booster, though Blue Origin had replaced all seven BE-4 engines on the refurbished stage.
- BlueBird 7 was designed to provide 4G and 5G service directly to standard smartphones using a very large phased-array antenna, and AST says it will keep its 2026 launch plans with multiple providers.