New York Times By Kenneth Chang 4/20/2026
The space agency is counting on Jeff Bezos’ company to deliver equipment essential to the next moon landing, only two years away.A rocket built by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space company appeared to launch perfectly on Sunday, its booster even landing successfully on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean.
A few hours later, however, it became clear that all had not gone well. The massive New Glenn rocket had failed in its primary task: putting a commercial satellite into the proper orbit.
AST SpaceMobile of Midland, Texas, later confirmed that its mammoth BlueBird 7 communications satellite was doomed after ending up in an orbit “too low to sustain operations.”
This is a setback not only for Blue Origin and AST SpaceMobile, but also possibly NASA. Although the space agency played no role in Sunday’s mission, it is counting on Blue Origin to support the Artemis moon program.
Blue Origin is one of two companies that NASA has hired to provide landers that are to take astronauts from lunar orbit to the surface of the moon as soon as 2028. Since Blue Origin’s lander is to be launched on a New Glenn rocket, any delays with the rocket will throw additional uncertainties into what is already an ambitious schedule.
Blue Origin has started an investigation, with oversight by the Federal Aviation Administration, to figure out what went wrong on Sunday and how to fix the problem. Until that is complete, New Glenn will be grounded, the F.A.A. said.
“It could take them three, four months, or longer,” said Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington-based think tank. “If it goes longer than that, then that’s disappointing, and that starts to impact the Artemis program.”
During Sunday’s launch from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, the countdown proceeded smoothly until it was stopped with less than four minutes left, for reasons Blue Origin has not explained.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/20/science/blue-origins-moon-nasa.html
