ASTS drops after BlueBird 7 launched into an incorrect orbit

AST SpaceMobile dropped 13% in premarket trading on Monday after the space internet company updated that its BlueBird 7 satellite, carried by Blue Origin’s New Glenn vehicle, was put into an incorrect position and will now be taken out of orbit.

“During the New Glenn 3 mission, BlueBird 7 was placed into a lower than planned orbit by the upper stage of the launch vehicle. While the satellite separated from the launch vehicle and powered on, the altitude is too low to sustain operations with its on-board thruster technology and will de-orbited. The cost of the satellite is expected to be recovered under the company’s insurance policy,” the company said in a press release.

Launched Sunday, April 19, BlueBird 7 would have been AST SpaceMobile’s eighth deployed satellite into low-Earth orbit as it races to catch up with SpaceX’s Starlink to put up the first satellite constellation capable of providing 5G connectivity anywhere in the world. The company continues to target approximately 45 satellites in orbit by the end of the year. (For context, SpaceX currently has more than 9,500 satellites deployed since 2019, though ASTS’s network plans to depend on less than 100 larger, more sophisticated satellites that individually gather signals more efficiently than Starlink’s mega constellation model.)

The incorrect positioning of the launch vehicle from Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin rocket New Glenn has been blamed for the failure, though the cost of the satellite is expected to be recovered under AST SpaceMobile’s insurance policy.

For Blue Origin itself, the mission did have one major silver lining, as it successfully reused one of its New Glenn rockets for the first time ever, per TechCrunch. The New Glenn model was the result of a decade-long, multibillion-dollar development and was hampered by delays last year. However, as one of the largest reusable vehicles in the world alongside SpaceX’s Falcon 9, it’s also seen as a key way that Bezos’ company can challenge Elon Musk’s outer space supremacy.

Separately, Bezos’ main company and the source of the bulk of his wealth, Amazon, announced last week that it was acquiring Globalstar in a move to join the direct-to-device competition starting in 2028.