The NewGlenn rocket built by Blue Origin will launch on Sunday 19th with the seventh connectivity system from the Ast SpaceMobile company on board. Born in 2017, it is worth 35 billion dollars
The third space mission of the New Glenn spacecraft will leave on Sunday 19 April. This was announced by the Blue Origin company, specifying that it will take place from Launch Complex 36 of the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, in Florida. The launch window will be open from 6:45 a.m. to 8:45 a.m. Eastern time, or 12:45 p.m. to 2:45 p.m. Eastern, and a live broadcast of the launch will be streamed on BlueOrigin.com starting 30 minutes before liftoff.
The mission will bring Ast SpaceMobile’s BlueBird 7 satellite into low Earth orbit will expand broadband network capacity to smartphones and will make it possible to start telecommunications service this year. This mission will see the return to Earth of the first stage of the rocket, called Never Tell Me The Odds, which was launched and landed successfully during the second mission of the program, which took place last November.
All the services of the BlueBird 7 satellite
The New Glenn is a private launcher developed by the Blue Origin company, which made its first flight on January 16, 2025. It is a project that provides the possibility of using two or three stages depending on load needs, each with a Be-4 engine powered by methane and liquid oxygen. The BlueBird 7 satellite is a real telecommunications centerequipped with a complex antenna (assembly of small antennas) measuring approximately 220 square meters, and is designed to enable smartphone broadband connections at up to 120 Mbps, with 4 and 5G broadband services including voice, data and video.
SpaceMobile numbers and dimensions
SpaceMobile, founded in 2017 in Midland, Texas, is now valued at nearly $35 billion. The company is developing the first space-based broadband cellular networkdesigned to connect directly to regular smartphones, eliminating cellular blind spots around the world. In practice we will no longer have “satellite” cell phones, but the possibility of connecting commercial ones directly to the satellites. For the launch event, management invited shareholders who have held shares for at least six months at the time of the Liftoff.
The company claims to have more than 3,850 patents and patent applications pending; over 50 mobile network operators in the world for a total of three billion subscribers. The first five commercial satellites of the BlueBird constellation were launched from Cape Canaveral on September 12, 2024 and then deployed into low Earth orbit. The network thus constituted it can also be connected from small portable terminals without bulky antennas necessary to activate the connections of competitors such as Starlink, Eutelsat OneWeb, Amazon Kuiper, Telesat Lightspeed, Hughes Net, Viasat. Iridium, Globalstar and Kepler communications.
The satellite communications revolution
A future therefore awaits us in which it will be possible to choose from dozens of operators for satellite communicationstaking advantage in particular of technologies for use in low orbit which facilitate connections, make them better in case of bad weather, but involve more complex satellite networks with necessarily higher orbital speeds (the closer the satellite is to the planet, the greater its speed must be to balance the force of gravity), and this makes the connection windows shorter, which are the moments in which the operator and the satellite have their respective antennas in optical range.
