Blue Origin schedules third New Glenn launch for late February, but not to the moon

Blue Origin is targeting late February for the third launch of its mega-rocket, New Glenn. But it won’t be heading to the moon, as the company had previously suggested. The rocket will instead carry a satellite to low-Earth orbit for AST SpaceMobile, marking the second time that Jeff Bezos’ space company has flown a commercial payload with New Glenn.

The company didn’t 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 for vacuum chamber testing. A launch date for that mission has not been set.

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

The launch will come at a busy month for spaceflight: NASA may launch its Artemis II mission, in which four astronauts will orbit the moon, as early as February 6; SpaceX is expected to start testing the third version of its Starship rocket; and NASA and SpaceX will launch the Crew-12 mission, which will help bring the International Space Station back up to full staff after the Crew-11 team was medically evacuated earlier this month.

For this launch, Blue Origin will reuse the booster stage from New Glenn’s second mission, which happened last November. The company recovered that 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 meant to regularly deliver payloads to Earth orbit and beyond, and it builds on the 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 multiple satellites to orbit to help that company build out its space-based cellular broadband network.

But New Glenn is just one piece of the company’s grander ambitions. In November, the company revealed a super-heavy variant of New Glenn that will be taller than a Saturn V rocket, on par with SpaceX’s Starship. And on Wednesday, the company announced a satellite internet constellation called TeraWave that it plans to start deploying in late 2027.

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