Blue Origin plans to launch its third New Glenn rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station shortly before dawn Sunday, which will carry AST Spacemobile’s Bluebird 7 satellite into low Earth orbit.
The launch of New Glenn 3, or NG-3 for short, is a significant milestone for Blue Origin’s heavy-lift rocket. The booster, ‘Never Tell Me the Odds’, was first launched in November 2025 and successfully landed on the company’s oceangoing landing platform, ‘Jacqueline’.
The launch of the liquid methane and liquid hydrogen fueled rocket from Pad 36 is scheduled during a two-hour launch window that opens at 6:45 a.m. EDT (1045 UTC) on Sunday, April 19. The rocket will take a south-easterly trajectory as it departs from the Space Coast.
U.S. Space Force meteorologists estimate a 90 percent change in weather acceptable for rocket launches.
Spaceflight Now will have live coverage of the launch starting one hour before liftoff.
While most of the boosters are being reused, Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp said the engines are not the same ones that powered the rockets to deliver NASA’s Escapade satellites into orbit.
“With our first refurbished booster we decided to replace all seven engines and test some upgrades, including a thermal protection system on one of the engine nozzles,” Limp wrote in a post on social media on April 13. “We plan to use the engines we flew for the NG-2 in future flights.”
Blue Origin became the second company, after SpaceX, to successfully land an orbital-class rocket booster in vertical descent.
Both companies use remotely piloted landing ships to retrieve their boosters. SpaceX has two landing pads in Florida as well as California. Blue Origin has not yet announced plans for a landing pad on the coast.
Blue Origin said it is designing its boosters to support 25 flights each, but it is unclear whether this will include reusing the same set of engines 25 times with the rest of the booster structure.
Bluebird 7 AST is the second satellite in SpaceMobile’s next-generation satellite constellation and is designed to support space-based cellular broadband for commercial and government customers. NG-3 will carry one so-called Block 2 satellite, but a future new Glenn mission could launch up to eight satellites, featuring an antenna and solar plane array spanning 2,400 square feet.
“We are on track to achieve our goal of deploying 45 to 60 satellites in low Earth orbit by the end of this year,” AST Spacemobile President and CEO Abel Avellon said in an earnings call in March. “To support our launch cadence through 2026, we expect the New Glenn booster to be reused every 30 days.”
