Speculation on future New Glenn launch schedule
According to anonymous sources at Blue Origin, the company has now delayed the second launch of its New Glenn rocket to September, ten months after its first launch in January 2025, and hopes to quickly follow with three more launches by the middle of 2026.
The September launch will launch NASA’s two smallsat Escapade Mars orbiters.
After Escapade, Blue Origin has several missions tentatively plotted out. However, sources cautioned that the manifest could be moved around due to the readiness of subsequent New Glenn vehicles and their payloads. Based upon information received by Ars, the launch manifest could look something like this:
- New Glenn 2: ESCAPADE (fall 2025)
- New Glenn 3: Firefly’s Elytra orbital transfer vehicle (end of 2025, early 2026)
- New Glenn 4: Blue Moon MK1 lander (first half of 2026)
- New Glenn 5: First batch of 49 Amazon Project Kuiper satellites (mid-2026)
Whether this schedule will occur as speculated is unknown. Blue Origin’s long term track record — slow and timid — suggests it is very unlikely. And even if it does fly as planned, it suggests strongly that Amazon is not going to meet its FCC license requirement to have 1,600 Kuiper satellites in orbit by July 2026. So far Amazon has only placed 54 operational Kuiper satellites into orbit, on two Atlas-5 launches. It has contracts to launch these satellites 46 times on ULA rockets (8 on Atlas-5 and 36 on Vulcan), 27 times on Blue Origin’s New Glenn, 18 times on ArianeGroup’s Ariane-6, and 3 times on SpaceX’s Falcon-9.
Except for the Falcon 9, none of the other rockets have begun flying with any frequency. Vulcan has only launched twice, New Glenn once, and Ariane-6 twice. All three have been extremely slow to ramp up operations, with months passing between each launch. To meet Amazon’s FCC license requirements, they will have to achieve between 35 to 60 launches in the next twelve months, a pace of three to six launches per month. At this point none of these companies appear capable of even coming close to doing this.
Nor does Amazon have the option to switch these launches to the Falcon 9. SpaceX would certainly accept the business, but the manifest for the Falcon 9 is presently very full. It is doubtful it could do more than double or triple its commitment to Amazon.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon. from any other book seller, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
According to anonymous sources at Blue Origin, the company has now delayed the second launch of its New Glenn rocket to September, ten months after its first launch in January 2025, and hopes to quickly follow with three more launches by the middle of 2026.
The September launch will launch NASA’s two smallsat Escapade Mars orbiters.
After Escapade, Blue Origin has several missions tentatively plotted out. However, sources cautioned that the manifest could be moved around due to the readiness of subsequent New Glenn vehicles and their payloads. Based upon information received by Ars, the launch manifest could look something like this:
- New Glenn 2: ESCAPADE (fall 2025)
- New Glenn 3: Firefly’s Elytra orbital transfer vehicle (end of 2025, early 2026)
- New Glenn 4: Blue Moon MK1 lander (first half of 2026)
- New Glenn 5: First batch of 49 Amazon Project Kuiper satellites (mid-2026)
Whether this schedule will occur as speculated is unknown. Blue Origin’s long term track record — slow and timid — suggests it is very unlikely. And even if it does fly as planned, it suggests strongly that Amazon is not going to meet its FCC license requirement to have 1,600 Kuiper satellites in orbit by July 2026. So far Amazon has only placed 54 operational Kuiper satellites into orbit, on two Atlas-5 launches. It has contracts to launch these satellites 46 times on ULA rockets (8 on Atlas-5 and 36 on Vulcan), 27 times on Blue Origin’s New Glenn, 18 times on ArianeGroup’s Ariane-6, and 3 times on SpaceX’s Falcon-9.
Except for the Falcon 9, none of the other rockets have begun flying with any frequency. Vulcan has only launched twice, New Glenn once, and Ariane-6 twice. All three have been extremely slow to ramp up operations, with months passing between each launch. To meet Amazon’s FCC license requirements, they will have to achieve between 35 to 60 launches in the next twelve months, a pace of three to six launches per month. At this point none of these companies appear capable of even coming close to doing this.
Nor does Amazon have the option to switch these launches to the Falcon 9. SpaceX would certainly accept the business, but the manifest for the Falcon 9 is presently very full. It is doubtful it could do more than double or triple its commitment to Amazon.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon. from any other book seller, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
“Blue Origin’s long term track record — slow and timid”
Now here’s an idea. Change the “gradatim ferociter” to “tardus et venit” (slow and timid in Latin)
I’m sure SpaceX’s F9 launch manifest doth runneth over. SpaceX is launching like crazy and no one else is launching much of anything at all – nor looks to be anytime soon. So everyone – even the conflicted Europeans – are still beating a path to its door.
But SpaceX’s launch cadence also continues to climb. It may well wind up launching 40 more Falcons this year than it did last year. If it sets a 2026 goal of 200 Falcon missions or above, it might be able to make Amazon a deal for anywhere from quite a bit to all of next year’s launch total increment. I don’t think even the upper end of such a deal would get half of Kuiper on orbit by July of next year, but it would get Amazon a lot closer than it’s going to get if it sticks strictly to the launch deals it currently has.
And, if Amazon doesn’t sign on for more SpaceX launches, I wonder just how sympathetic the FCC would be to a plea for deadline extension. It’s one thing to try everything and still come up short, but failing to try the obvious and readily available at some kind of reasonable scale isn’t going to be a good look.
Hello Dick,
In justice, I don’t disagree. Amazon has struggled badly with getting production started, and as we know from the shareholder suit, Amazon’s board insisted on trying to launch it all on their own terms (i.e., no SpaceX). Amazon has itself to blame for a lot of this problem.
And yet, it’s clear that the politics of the situation are pushing harder and harder at having bonafide competition to SpaceX. Some of this ebbs and flows from the state of the relationship between Trump and Musk — this week, Trump looks like he’d go down and put in a few hours on the Kuiper assembly in person if he could spare the time — but there are far more ingredients in this recipe. The FCC wants the competition; the industry and many of its customers want the competition; DoD wants the competition; Congress wants the competition. Or to be more precise, critical masses of people in these organizations want the competition. And right now, unfortunately, Kuiper is the only thing on the horizon that looks even possible as such competition.
So I do not think we should be surprised if the FCC bends over backwards to give Amazon an extension next year when the time comes. I think that will be even easier to do if Kuiper has got production going at a reasonable tempo — no matter how badly they and their favored launch providers have bolluxed up the launch side of the equation.
Why didn’t Elon just make more Falcons?
It’s clear to everyone not blinded by Randians ideology that the Starship guys simply don’t know what they’re doing anymore–their best guys are leaving.