Live Coverage: Third flight of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket to feature 1st reuse of booster

Blue Origin plans to launch its third New Glenn rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station shortly before dawn on Sunday, carrying AST SpaceMobile’s BlueBird 7 satellite into low Earth orbit.

The launch of New Glenn 3, or NG-3 for short, marks a critical milestone for Blue Origin’s heavy-lift rocket. The booster, ‘Never Tell Me the Odds’, previously launched in November 2025 and successfully touched down on the company’s ocean-going landing platform, ‘Jacklyn’.

Liftoff of the liquid methane and liquid hydrogen fueled rocket from pad 36 is scheduled during a two-hour launch window that opens Sunday, April 19 at 6:45 a.m. EDT (1045 UTC). The rocket will take a south-easterly trajectory on departure from the Space Coast.

U.S. Space Force meteorologists forecast a 90-percent change of acceptable weather for the rocket’s launch.

Spaceflight Now will have live coverage of the launch starting an hour prior to liftoff.

While much of the booster is being reused, Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp said the engines are not the same as the ones that powered the rocket to deliver NASA’s EscaPADE satellites to orbit.

“With our first refurbished booster we elected to replace all seven engines and test out a few upgrades including a thermal protection system on one of the engine nozzles,” Limp wrote in an April 13 post on social media. “We plan to use the engines we flew for NG-2 on future flights.”

Blue Origin became just the second company, after SpaceX, to successfully land an orbital class rocket booster in a vertical descent.

Both companies use remotely-operated landing vessels to recover their boosters. SpaceX also has two landing pads in Florida, along with one in California. Blue Origin hasn’t announced plans for an on-shore landing pad just yet.

Blue Origin said it’s designing its boosters to support up to 25 flights each, but it’s unclear if that will include reusing the same set of engines 25 times along with the rest of the booster structure.

BlueBird 7 is the second satellite in AST SpaceMobile’s next-generation satellite constellation and is designed to support space-based cellular broadband for commercial and government customers. NG-3 will carry a single so-called Block 2 satellite, but future New Glenn mission can loft up to eight of the satellites, which feature an antenna and solar planel array, spanning 2,400 square feet.

“We remain on track to achieve our target of deploying 45 to 60 satellites into low Earth orbit by the end of this year,” AST Spacemobile’s Chairman and CEO Abel Avellan said in an earning call in March. “To support our launch cadence during 2026, we expect the New Glenn booster to be reused every 30 days.”