Blue Origin Nails the Landing, Loses the Satellite

Jeff Bezos's rocket company spent years and billions to perfectly land its reusable New Glenn booster at sea for the first time — then deployed its customer's satellite into a completely useless orbit.

Blue Origin Nails the Landing, Loses the Satellite

Inside Blue Origin's mission control on Sunday, the cheers were deafening. After years of development and billions of Bezos's dollars, the company's 29-story New Glenn rocket had flown with a reused first-stage booster — and that booster had just landed on a drone ship bobbing in the Atlantic. The booster, nicknamed "Never Tell Me the Odds," had lived up to its name. It was a genuine milestone in Blue Origin's long chase of SpaceX's Falcon 9, which has completed over 300 successful booster landings.

Then came the silence. Hours after launch, customer AST SpaceMobile — a startup building a space-based cellular broadband network — released the gut-punch: the rocket's upper stage had failed. Their BlueBird 7 satellite was deployed into an orbit so low it was unreachable by its own thrusters. The hardware will now be deorbited, burning up in the atmosphere. AST SpaceMobile said the loss would be covered by insurance.

Blue Origin proved their booster is reusable. They just couldn't prove their rocket works end-to-end — which is the only part that matters to paying customers.

Gobble's Take: Brand new truck, wrong address — and the customer's package is now a fireball over the Atlantic.

Sources: GeekWire · CBS News · UPI

NASA Just Sent Humans to the Moon for the First Time Since 1972 — and the Astronauts' Bodies Are Now the Data

Four astronauts splashed down in the Pacific after looping around the Moon on a 10-day journey that covered 252,756 miles — farther from Earth than any human has traveled since Apollo 13 in 1970. Commander Reid Wiseman, Pilot Victor Glover, Mission Specialists Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen are back at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. But their work isn't done: they are now the mission's most important experiment.

Artemis II, the first crewed Moon mission in over 50 years, was explicitly a test flight. NASA's Orion spacecraft — the capsule designed to eventually land crews on the lunar surface — needed a human stress test before the agency commits to an actual Moon landing with Artemis III. In their first press conference, Wiseman described the reentry as "scary and risky": the capsule hit Earth's atmosphere at nearly 25,000 mph, generating temperatures that made the heat shield glow.

For the coming weeks, scientists will track every physiological change in the crew — vision degradation, balance, muscle loss, coordination — to map what deep space does to the human body before asking the next crew to stay longer. They went to the Moon and back in 10 days. The medical debrief alone will take months.

Gobble's Take: The most consequential physical of your life, and you have to sit through it after spending 10 days orbiting the Moon.

Sources: NASA · NYT · Spaceflight Now