Blue Origin plans to launch New Glenn for a third time in late February, but not to the moon

Blue Origin is targeting late February for the third launch of its massive New Glenn rocket. But it won’t be heading to the moon, as happened a company king Previously suggested. 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 instead of its own robotic lunar lander. The lander, known as Blue Moon Mark 1 (MK1), is currently being shipped to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Texas. Vacuum chamber test. No launch date has been set for that mission.

However, this will be New Glenn’s third launch in just over a year, after the rocket spent a decade in development.

The launch will come in a busy month for spaceflight: NASA may launch the Artemis II mission, in which four astronauts will orbit the moon, as early as this year. February 6; SpaceX is expected to begin testing the third version of its Starship rocket. NASA and SpaceX will launch the Crew-12 mission, which will help return the International Space Station to its full crew after Crew-11 ends. They were medically evacuated earlier this month.

For this launch, Blue Origin will reuse the booster stage from the second New Glenn mission, which finally happened November. The company recovered this booster by landing it on a drone ship in the ocean, similar to what SpaceX has been doing with its Falcon 9 boosters for years.

New Glenn is Blue Origin’s first vehicle intended to regularly deliver payloads to 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 a deal with AST SpaceMobile to send several satellites into orbit to help that company build its satellite cellular broadband network.

But New Glen is just one part of the company’s larger ambitions. In November, the company unveiled a super-heavy version of the New Glenn rocket, which will be longer than the Saturn V, on par with SpaceX’s Starship. On Wednesday, the company announced a satellite internet constellation called TeraWave that it plans to begin deploying in late 2027.

The company also hopes to use its Blue Moon landers on missions to the Moon and Mars, and is developing another spacecraft called Blue Ring that could host and deploy payloads for other space companies.