Blue Origin's next New Glenn flight is next week

It was just over two months ago that the third New Glenn mission launched, and resulted in a failure of the upper stage of the vehicle and the customer's satellite in an unusable orbit. 

The Federal Aviation Administration and Blue Origin announced the closure of the failure investigation May 22. Yesterday, officials confirmed Blue Origin’s next launch will loft a payload of 48 commercial satellites for Amazon’s broadband network in low-Earth orbit. This will be the most satellites Amazon has launched on a single rocket, surpassing previous flights on United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V, SpaceX’s Falcon 9, and Europe’s Ariane 6.

The launch is currently scheduled for No Earlier Than next Thursday, June 4, 1:21 PM EDT from Launch Complex 36 - or LC-36 - on Cape Canaveral Space Force Station (CCSFS). While there's no indication of how the size of these Amazon Leo satellites compare to the various versions of Starlink, that's really only important if you're comparing payload sizes between the various vehicles that are available - which the Ars Technica source article indirectly did in that reference to "the most satellites Amazon has launched on a single rocket" and the various launch vehicles Amazon Leo has used. 

It's best to consider that June 4th date and time as a goal that might slip in the event of troubles going through the next tests before they can launch, but a two month turnaround from a mission failure to clearing for the next launch is positive for Blue Origin. It's saying that the efforts to increase launch cadence are having the desired effects. 

While SpaceX has over 10,000 Starlink satellites in service, that's a difficult task for Amazon Leo and really any other new providers. Simply from the viewpoint of catching up with the service that has the longest head start in the market, given how many satellites they want to launch and that inevitably turns into questions about how many a given launch vehicle can lift at a time. 

Getting New Glenn into service for Amazon should help accelerate deployment of the Amazon Leo satellite constellation, a would-be competitor with SpaceX’s Starlink network. ULA boasts a large backlog for the Vulcan rocket, which can loft 45 Amazon Leo satellites in one go. But the US Space Force has reserved numerous Vulcan missions of its own. ULA says it is equipped to support two Vulcan launches per month once the rocket is flying routinely.

Blue Origin has the advantage of reusability. The New Glenn rocket’s first-stage booster is reusable, a capability first demonstrated on the company’s last flight April 19, despite the upper-stage failure that occurred later in the mission.

The bulk of Amazon’s satellites have so far been launched on ULA’s Atlas V rocket, a reliable workhorse that is nearing retirement. Amazon has just two more launches on the Atlas V, each carrying 29 satellites. 

The next Atlas V mission for Blue Origin is scheduled to launch from Cape Canaveral on Friday evening at 7:33 PM EDT from SLC-41. Amazon Leo currently has 302 satellites in orbit, and this launch should push the network past the 10 percent mark for the total number of 3232 spacecraft. You may recall that the FCC approved Amazon Leo's plans for their satellite-based service with a condition that they have 50% of the planned 3200 satellites in service by this July. 

That absolutely can't happen - there's not enough satellites and even if there were, there's not enough launch capacity to put them up in orbit.  The best argument Amazon LEO has is to say they're doing as much as they can to get there. 

The 7-meter-diameter payload fairing offers twice the payload volume of the smaller 5-meter fairings used on Falcon 9, Vulcan, and Ariane 6. Credit: Blue Origin

As I often do, last words to Stephen Clark at Ars Technica - who goes into many details I left out here.

With Blue Origin’s New Glenn soon to fly its first mission for Amazon, Arianespace’s Ariane 6 on stable footing, and the prospect of more Falcon 9 launches on the horizon, Amazon may have turned a corner in solving its rocket conundrum.

If it has, a well-funded competitor to SpaceX’s Starlink service, long dominant in the satellite broadband market, may finally be at hand. Still, Starlink has the advantage of launching satellites cheaply and reliably on Falcon 9. SpaceX’s internal costs for a Falcon 9 launch are thought to be close to $15 million, one-fifth of the $74 million SpaceX charges external customers like Amazon for a dedicated flight.