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April 19 (Reuters) – Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin on Sunday said its New Glenn rocket booster touched down after its launch, marking its first landing of \u200ca reused booster.<\/p>\n
The rocket, which had a launch window of 6:45 a.m. \u200cto 12:19 p.m. ET on Sunday, lifted off at around 7:25 a.m. ET (1125 GMT) from Cape Canaveral, Florida, \u200band the booster touchdown happened about 10 minutes later.<\/p>\n
New Glenn carried AST SpaceMobile’s BlueBird 7 satellite to low-Earth orbit in a flight that marks a pivotal step for the company.<\/p>\n
The mission was key to demonstrating that New Glenn, a 29-story heavy-lift rocket, has a \u200creliable booster reuse capability and \u2060can compete with Elon Musk’s SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.<\/p>\n
The rocket’s booster, dubbed “Never Tell Me the Odds,” previously flew on the NG-2 mission in \u2060November and was recovered, setting up this week’s milestone attempt.<\/p>\n
The booster’s name is a nod to a Han Solo line in the film “Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back.”<\/p>\n
Following a series \u200bof delays \u200bearlier this month, the mission comes amid a \u200bsurge of activity in the space \u200csector, including the successful NASA Artemis II lunar flyby that took humans further from Earth than any had traveled before.<\/p>\n
Blue Origin had said in November that it would build a bigger, more powerful variant of its New Glenn rocket, called New Glenn 9×4.<\/p>\n
AST SATELLITE CONSTELLATION<\/p>\n
New Glenn is designed for the higher end of the commercial launch market \u200cwith a seven-meter (23-foot) nose cone allowing it to \u200bcarry bulkier payloads, including multiple satellites in a single \u200bmission.<\/p>\n
AST SpaceMobile’s BlueBird 7, carried into \u200borbit on NG-3, is the second satellite in its next-generation Block \u200c2 constellation. The satellite features what the \u200bcompany describes as \u200bthe largest commercial communications array deployed in low-Earth orbit.<\/p>\n
Designed to connect directly with smartphones, the satellite is part of an effort to build a space-based cellular broadband \u200bnetwork, similar to Amazon’s \u200cLeo or SpaceX’s Starlink.<\/p>\n
AST SpaceMobile is targeting a constellation of 45 to 60 \u200bsuch satellites by the end of 2026.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Chandni Shah in Bengaluru; \u200bEditing by Jane Merriman and Bill Berkrot)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n