Amazon's satellite internet business, which competes with Elon Musk's Starlink, has hit a setback. New Glenn, the next-generation rocket built by Blue Origin, the space company founded by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, failed to place a satellite into orbit during a test flight and has been grounded.
According to the Financial Times on Thursday, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has ordered Blue Origin to halt rocket operations and required an investigation into the cause of the failure to place the satellite into its intended orbit.
"One of the rocket's engines failed to produce sufficient thrust, preventing the satellite from reaching its target orbit," Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp said on X, formerly Twitter. "Under FAA oversight, we will analyze the precise cause of the anomaly, implement corrective measures, and return to flight as quickly as possible."
Blue Origin's New Glenn lifted off with a communications satellite from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on the morning of January 19. Nine minutes and 30 seconds after liftoff, the rocket's first-stage booster landed on an offshore platform in the Atlantic Ocean. The booster was a reused version of the one that successfully landed at sea after its first launch in November last year. It marked the first time Blue Origin has relaunched and recovered a previously used booster. However, the ultimate goal of the mission — placing the satellite into orbit — was not achieved. While Blue Origin succeeded in recovering and reusing the booster, it failed in its core mission of satellite deployment, amounting to a half success.
Experts believe the issue is unlikely to be resolved quickly. The 98-meter-tall New Glenn is the key asset capable of carrying the largest number of Amazon satellites, but as a new rocket, regulatory scrutiny is expected to be more rigorous and in-depth than for existing rockets.
A U.S. consulting firm said, "It could take months before U.S. regulators clear New Glenn to fly again," adding that "pressure is mounting on Amazon to rely on outside launch providers." As a result, Amazon may turn to rockets operated by Musk's SpaceX to launch its satellites. Amazon currently has about 240 satellites in orbit, far behind SpaceX's fleet of more than 10,000 satellites.
Amazon has been under schedule pressure, asking the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) earlier this year to extend by two years a July deadline to launch 1,600 satellites. Launches through Arianespace and United Launch Alliance (ULA) are scheduled for the last week of this month, but the satellite deployment timeline has been hampered by a series of recent setbacks, including the grounding of ULA's Vulcan rocket in February.
Panos Panay, Amazon's head of devices and services, said in an interview with the FT, "We plan to launch about 700 satellites by mid-year and aim for up to three launches per month through the FCC's July deadline. The key is launch frequency, and we will rapidly build out the satellite network over the next six to nine months."
Meanwhile, Blue Origin is participating in NASA's Artemis program, a crewed lunar exploration project, to develop the lunar lander "Blue Moon." In the Artemis III mission scheduled for 2027, Blue Moon is set to conduct low-Earth orbit test flights alongside SpaceX's Starship lander. To focus its capabilities on the Artemis program, Blue Origin has suspended launches of its space tourism rocket "New Shepard" for at least two years since January.
