Blue Origin is set to launch its third New Glenn rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station shortly before dawn on Sunday, sending AST SpaceMobile’s BlueBird 7 satellite toward low Earth orbit on the company’s first mission with a reused booster. The launch, known as New Glenn 3 or NG-3, is scheduled to open in a two-hour window at 6:45 a.m. EDT, with liftoff planned from the Space Coast on a south-easterly trajectory.
The booster making the trip is named Never Tell Me the Odds, the same first-stage rocket that flew in November 2025 and later touched down on Blue Origin’s ocean-going landing platform, Jacklyn. That recovery made Blue Origin the second company after SpaceX to land an orbital-class booster in vertical descent, a milestone the company now hopes to repeat and refine as it pushes toward routine reuse.
The launch matters because it is the first reuse of a New Glenn booster and the clearest test yet of whether Blue Origin can turn that recovery into a working system. U.S. Space Force meteorologists are forecasting a 90-percent chance of acceptable weather, and Spaceflight Now said it will begin live coverage an hour before liftoff, underscoring how closely watched the mission is by the launch industry.
Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp said the engines on the refurbished booster are not the same as those that powered the rocket that sent NASA’s EscaPADE satellites to orbit. In a post on April 13, he said the company replaced all seven engines on its first refurbished booster and tested a thermal protection system on one of the engine nozzles, adding that Blue Origin plans to use the engines flown on NG-2 in future missions.
That detail matters because Blue Origin has said its boosters are designed to support up to 25 flights each, but it has not been clear whether that target applies to the same engine set or only to the reusable stage itself. The company hot fired the rocket on Thursday night in a roughly 40-second engine test, a final check before Sunday’s attempt.
BlueBird 7 is the second satellite in AST SpaceMobile’s next-generation constellation and is designed to support space-based cellular broadband for commercial and government customers. NG-3 will carry a single Block 2 satellite, though future New Glenn flights are expected to loft up to eight of the Block 2 satellites at a time.
AST SpaceMobile said in March that it remained on track to deploy 45 to 60 satellites into low Earth orbit by the end of 2026, and it expects the New Glenn booster to be reused every 30 days to support that cadence. The company’s plan depends on whether Blue Origin can keep turning boosters around quickly enough to make those flights practical.
Blue Origin’s attempt comes the same day launch activity is crowding the Space Coast, including another rocket mission that already lifted off Thursday morning. What Sunday’s New Glenn launch will show is whether Blue Origin can move from landing a booster to reusing one on schedule, and whether that promise holds up under the demands of commercial satellite deployment.
