Blue Origin Failed to Deploy Payload after Booster Landing, WHY! Lunar Lander Mission Delayed!?

After endless delays, New Glenn 3 finally launched with a mix of success and drama that left the industry reaching for its flight insurance. Blue Origin nailed the booster landing but fumbled the payload delivery, creating a bittersweet milestone. Meanwhile, SpaceX quietly set another massive landing record, making history look like a routine chore. And ULA's Vulcan is considering a light version of itself to get back in the air. Let's dive into these high stakes developments on today's episode of Great SpaceX. The entire aerospace industry was glued to the New Glenn launch pads last weekend, watching the live streams with the kind of nervous twitchy energy you usually save for a first date or a particularly suspicious looking street taco. After a successful hot fire test that seemingly went well, the massive rocket was actually lowered back down from its vertical position, which immediately sent the internet rumor mill into a tailspin regarding another potential multi-month delay. We all know how this goes, someone sees a technician carrying a wrench with a slightly worried expression, and suddenly the forums are convinced the entire engine block is being replaced. But in a move that genuinely surprised the pessimists and delighted the fans, the massive vehicle was re-erected and successfully launched on the morning of the 19th, exactly as the revised schedule had planned. Early in the day, long before the sun even had the chance to show its face over the Florida coast, the complex fuel loading process began in the dark with the rocket looking like a glowing cryogenic monument against the night sky. Initially, Blue Origin aimed for a 6.45 AM Eastern liftoff, but as is tradition in the world of rocket science, the countdown hit a snag at the T-3 minutes and 57 seconds mark for a mystery reason that the company kept closer to their chest than a winning poker hand. It was the kind of hold that makes you wonder if someone forgot to plug in a sensor or if Jeff Bezos needed one last coffee before the show started. After 7 AM, the clock finally resumed its march towards zero, and at 7.25 AM Eastern, those seven BE-4 engines finally roared to life, lifting New Glenn for the third time in less than 18 months with a sound that probably woke up every bird in the Tri-County area and rattled the windows of every sleepy tourist in Titusville. While the initial climb to space was a visual masterpiece, the real drama began when the two stages decided to go their separate ways like a celebrity couple after a three-week marriage. The first stage, which has been affectionately and perhaps somewhat ironically named Never Tell Me The Odds, performed beautifully during its second trip to the edge of space. It's worth noting that this booster was already a veteran, having flown before, and it handled the transition back into the atmosphere with the grace of a high diver. After separation, the booster executed its re-entry and landing burns with incredible precision, eventually touching down safely on the Jaclyn drone ship waiting out in the Atlantic. This marks a massive earth-shaking milestone for Blue Origin because they have now officially reflown and recovered an orbital-class booster, proving they have finally stepped into the reused racetrack that SpaceX has been dominating for over a decade. Achieving this in just three total flights is an objectively impressive feat of engineering, even if the landing itself was a bit more dramatic than a SpaceX recovery. Upon touchdown, the booster created a massive towering cloud of yellowish-black smoke that made the vehicle look like it was trying to pull a ninja-style vanishing act on the deck of the ship. Whether that smoke indicates a small technical hiccup, some scorched thermal protection, or just a very dirty exhaust from the BE-4 engines remains to be seen. But for now, Jeff Bezos has a shiny, slightly-used rocket back in his collection, and the fans have a new reason to cheer. However, just when the team in the control room was probably ready to break out the non-alcoholic champagne and start the victory parade, the second stage decided to provide the bad news portion of the evening. Everything seemed to be going perfectly through the initial engine cuts and the fairing separation, but then something went sideways in a way that no one really predicted during the pre-flight briefings. The AST Bluebird 7 satellite was successfully deployed from the but it ended up in an orbit so low that it was basically scraping the top of the atmosphere like a car with a flat tire trying to drive on the highway. AST Mobile confirmed later that the satellite is powered on and communicating, but it simply does not have enough fuel or thrust in its onboard thrusters to fight against the massive atmospheric drag at that altitude. To put it simply, the satellite is destined to become a very expensive and very bright shooting star as it inevitably deorbits and burns up. It's a tough pill to swallow for everyone involved. Having the booster come home perfectly only to wash the payload head for a fiery deorbit is like a mailman successfully driving through a blizzard only to drop the package into a wood chipper on your front porch. We're still waiting for the formal engineering autopsy on what exactly went wrong with that upper stage. Whether it was a fuel leak in the liquid hydrogen system, a faulty igniter on the BE-3U engines, or just a very expensive math error in the flight software, Blue Origin has some serious homework to do before they risk another mission. Returning to the Blue Origin situation, the failure of the upper stage is particularly stinging because of who the customers are for the upcoming missions. Bezos isn't just the founder of Blue Origin, he's also the guy behind Amazon, which is currently trying to launch its massive Kuiper satellite constellation now rebranded to Amazon Leo to compete with Starlink. When your own rocket fails to put a satellite in the right spot, it makes for a very awkward Thanksgiving dinner between the Amazon and Blue Origin departments. If the upper stage can't be trusted, the entire Kuiper project, which involves thousands of satellites, could be pushed back by months or even years. And then there's the Blue Moon Lander, which is supposed to take NASA astronauts back to the lunar surface. If you can't get a satellite into a stable low earth orbit, trying to precision land a massive craft on the moon starts to look like a much steeper mountain to climb. Blue Origin has all the money in the world, but as they are finding out, you can't just buy your way out of the laws of physics or the unforgiving reality of vacuum-rated engine cycles. Despite the setback with the Bluebird 7 satellite, there is a silver lining in the way the industry responded to the launch. Seeing Elon Musk and the NASA administrators send their congratulations to Jeff Bezos for the booster landing shows that at the end of the day, everyone wants to see more rockets coming back to earth in one piece. It's a small moment of professional courtesy in an industry that is usually defined by cutthroat competition and billionaire twitter feuds. It's almost touching, really, like two rival captains saluting each other across a stormy sea before they go back to trying to outmaneuver one another. Of course, the congratulations probably come a bit easier for Elon when he knows he has 597 more landings under his belt than the other guy. It's easy to be a gracious winner when you're laps ahead in the race, but it's still a nice gesture that reminds us that the goal is ultimately to make space accessible for everyone, not just the guys with the biggest checkbooks. As we look toward the next few months, the schedule is absolutely packed with potential history-making moments. We're watching for the next Starship flight, which promises to be even more ambitious than the last, and we're waiting to see if Blue Orchid can fix their upper stage problems in time for the next new Glenn attempt. It feels like every time we turn on the news, someone is either launching a new rocket, landing an old one, or proposing a radical change to how we get to orbit. It's a wild, unpredictable, and incredibly loud era of human history, and I am honestly just glad I have a front-row seat to the madness. I sometimes wonder what people 50 years from now will think when they read about this time. They'll probably laugh at how excited we got over a few hundred landings while they're taking the daily shuttle to the Mars colonies, but for us, right now, every successful touchdown and every lesson learned from a failure is a massive step forward. While Blue Origin is very much still learning the ropes and experiencing the growing pains of the reused game, SpaceX is out here setting records that feel like they belong in a far-future science fiction novel rather than a contemporary news report. On the same day, April 19th, while everyone was distracted by the new Glenn drama, a Falcon 9 lifted off from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, and successfully landed its booster B1097 on the Of Course I Still Love You drone ship. This was not just another landing in a long string of successes, it was the 600th successful recovery for the SpaceX team. To put that in perspective, landing a rocket 600 times is a feat so statistically absurd and technologically daunting that if you told a rocket scientist about it 20 years ago, they would have politely asked you what kind of hallucinogens were you on. This achievement received much praise. Musk said on X, lots of rocket landings. Isaacman also said, congrats on the major milestone, unimaginable to most just a few years ago. At this point, SpaceX is landing orbital rocket boosters more frequently than most people change the oil in their cars. It has reached a level of operational consistency that makes their competitors look like they're playing checkers, while SpaceX is playing four-dimensional chess with a side of orbital mechanics and a dash of mountain-sized ego. Every time a Falcon 9 lands now, it feels less like a miracle and more like a routine bus stop, which is perhaps the greatest compliment you can pay to an engineering team. They've made the impossible look utterly mundane. Moving from the routine success of the Falcon 9 to the struggling giants of the industry, we have to talk about the ULA Vulcan, which is currently undergoing a bit of a high-profile identity crisis thanks to some stubborn side boosters. As many of you are aware, this rocket is currently grounded because of ongoing issues with the solid rocket boosters provided by Northrop Grumman, problems that have cropped up twice now and sparked a major investigation. Because of this, the U.S. Space Force has made a proposal that is frankly a bit humiliating for a heavy lift rocket. They want to launch Vulcan without the boosters entirely. It's essentially the aerospace version of your boss telling you that since your car's fancy turbocharger is broken and might explode, you should just take the doors off and see if you can make it work on three wheels. Lt. Gen. Phil Gerrant suggested that if they just stripped the solids off, they can keep the manifest moving, even if it means the rocket has a lot less oomph for heavy payloads. This low-carb diet for the Vulcan would certainly get the rocket flying again, but it would also mean the Space Force has to hand over all the heavy-duty, high-altitude missions to SpaceX. That has to be a bitter pill for ULA to swallow, as it effectively means their shiny new rocket has to sit at the kids' table while the Falcon Heavy and Starship handle the grown-up work. We'll have to wait and see if Vulcan decides to go on this restricted diet, or if they will choose to stay on the ground until their boosters are finally trustworthy again. Thinking about the implications of these shifts, the decision to fly Vulcan without its solid boosters isn't just about weight. It's a massive blow to the public image of a rocket that was supposed to be the versatile successor to the Atlas and Delta families. When you see a Vulcan on the pad, those white solid boosters are iconic. They represent the raw power needed to punch through the thickest parts of the atmosphere. Removing them is like seeing a bodybuilder who decided to skip leg day for an entire year. It just doesn't look right, and you know the performance is going to suffer. If the Space Force starts shifting missions away from ULA because the Vulcan can't handle the heavy lifting without its extra boosters, it further reinforces the monopoly that SpaceX currently enjoys. It's a strange time in the industry when the government's best solution to a technical failure is to simply use less of the rocket. Meanwhile, the engineers at Northrop Grumman are likely working around the clock to figure out why their hardware keeps having issues, probably fueled by enough caffeine to launch a small satellite themselves. That wraps up this episode of Great SpaceX. From New Glenn 3's bittersweet debut to SpaceX's routine 600th landing, the space race is moving faster and weirder than ever. Thanks for nerding out with us today over hardware and orbital paths. I appreciate you spending your time here instead of wrestling with a stubborn lawnmower. This is Kevin, and I'll be back to track every launch and every mystery smoke cloud. Until then, keep your eyes on the horizon and stay curious. The universe is huge, our rockets are catching up, and the view is only getting better. See you in the next one.