AST SpaceMobile, which is supposed to launch a satellite-to-phone service for Bell and Telus this year, recently had an orbit-related issue.
According to a statement from AST, “During the New Glenn 3 mission, BlueBird 7 was placed into a lower than planned orbit by the upper stage of the launch vehicle. While the satellite separated from the launch vehicle and powered on, the altitude is too low to sustain operations with its onboard thruster technology.”
Following this statement, Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp offered more details on X.
Now that we have a more complete view, we wanted to provide an update on our NG-3 mission. While we are pleased with the nominal booster recovery, we clearly didn’t deliver the mission our customer wanted, and our team expects. Early data suggest that on our second GS2 burn, one…
— Dave Limp (@davill) April 20, 2026
BlueBird 7 would have been AST SpaceMobile’s eighth satellite deployed into low Earth orbit (LEO), and is one of the many planned to help with the space-based cellular broadband network. BlueBird 8 to 10 is expected to deploy in the next 30 days; however, the company is currently in production through BlueBird 32.
AST SpaceMobile expects an orbital launch every one to two months on average during 2026, and is working with multiple launch providers. It aims to have 45 satellites in orbit by the end of 2026.
Blue Origin is a space technology company founded by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. It competes primarily with SpaceX, though it’s currently behind the Elon Musk-owned space company. Notably, Amazon has had to use SpaceX to launch some of the satellites for its Starlink competitor Leo as the company tries to catch up to SpaceX.
Source: AST SpaceMobile, Via: PCMag
