- Blue Origin reused a rocket booster on its latest mission
- This was the first time it has done this, marking a major milestone
- However, the mission was a failure as it didn’t place its satellite payload high enough
Over the weekend Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space company hit a major milestone by successfully re-using a rocket booster for the first time — deploying the same ‘Never Tell Me The Odds’ rocket in Sunday’s NG-3 mission that it used back in November for NG-2.
This should be a time for celebration as Blue Origin proves it can better compete with SpaceX on sustainability and space travel prowess, but it isn’t. Why? Because NG-3’s primary objective was an utter failure.
Beyond a rocket booster reusability test, Blue Origin’s primary goal for this flight was to drop an AST SpaceMobile communications satellite – BlueBird 7 — into orbit. It did technically do this, but NG-3 placed the satellite “lower than planned” as AST phrased it.
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Per an AST SpaceMobile statement, “While the satellite separated from the launch vehicle and powered on, the altitude is too low to sustain operations with its on-board thruster technology and will [be] de-orbited. The cost of the satellite is expected to be recovered under the company’s insurance policy.”
This means the satellite will be repositioned and left to burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere.
It IS rocket science
For AST SpaceMobile this failure isn’t world-ending — it says it still has plans to launch 45 more satellites before 2026 ends — but for Blue Origin this failure will leave an embarrassing stain on what should have otherwise been a momentous flight.
The silver lining is, if this mission had to be a failure, at least Blue Origin messed up with a satellite launch and not the first launch of its lunar lander — which was originally meant to be NG-3’s purpose.
The next NASA Artemis mission is expected to drop people onto the moon for the first time in over 50 years, but it still needs a lander. SpaceX and Blue Origin are currently racing to design and test the craft that will take astronauts from their spaceship to the lunar surface, but neither has completed the project yet.
Because the Artemis missions are intended to establish a permanent lunar base, the new lander approach can’t be a repeat of the one-and-done style previous missions to the moon — it needs to be something that can repeatedly shuttle crew and cargo.
There’s also a lot less room for failure when carrying crew compared with cargo. Things can be replaced, people’s lives cannot.
We’ll have to wait and see how this mistake affects Blue Origin’s lunar lander bid. Rocket science is famously difficult, so hopefully this will simply be a learning experience for the company.
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hamish.hector@futurenet.com (Hamish Hector)
