The U.S. aviation regulator has ordered billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s space company Blue Origin to ground its New Glenn rocket pending an investigation into a malfunction that prevented the proper deployment of a communications satellite during a launch from Florida on Sunday (19 April).
Under the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) directive, Blue Origin must complete a mishap inquiry and obtain the agency’s approval of the final report and any corrective actions before it can resume flying the rocket.
New Glenn’s failure to launch the satellite into high enough orbit is a setback to Bezos’s firm's quest to compete with SpaceX, the world’s leading rocket launch service ran by the world’s richest man, Elon Musk.
Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp, wrote on X, on Monday that early data suggested one of the two BE-3U engines that power the rocket’s upper stage “didn’t produce sufficient thrust” to allow the satellite to reach the target orbit.
"Blue Origin is leading the anomaly investigation with FAA oversight to learn from the data and implement the improvements needed to quickly return to flight operations," he added.
The BlueBird 7 satellite, designed by Texas firm AST, was part of AST’s effort to build a space-based cellular broadband network, similar to SpaceX’s Starlink.
The ill-fated satellite re-entered the atmosphere on Monday, presumably burning up harmless over the earth, according to Harvard-Smithsonian astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell, who tracks space objects for the American Astronomical Society.
New Glenn’s reusable lower-stage rocket booster blasted off successfully from Cape Canaveral on Sunday morning at around 7:25 a.m. ET (1125 GMT) and touched down around 10 minutes later.
Blue Origin, founded by Bezos in 2000, was until recent years known mainly for flying celebrities and other wealthy passengers to the edge of space and back in its New Shepard rocketship.
The company announced in January, however, that it was halting its space tourism business for at least two years to focus more on commercial launch services and building a moon lander for NASA.
Sunday's mission was a key test of the 29-storey New Glenn rocket, in its bid to compete with SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket. The mission comes amid a surge of activity in the space sector.
Earlier in April, NASA’s Artemis II mission made history with a lunar flyby that took the astronauts further from earth than ever before.
Meanwhile, SpaceX is building a special version of its Starship designed to land astronauts on the moon, as part of NASA’s Artemis programme.
The developments come amid a U.S. space race with China to return humans to the moon for the first time since 1972.
Beijing, which plans to land its first crewed mission on the moon by 2030, is considered to currently be ahead in the contest.
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