Errant upper stage spoils Blue Origin’s success in reusing New Glenn booster

Blue Origin's reused first stage hit its targets, but New Glenn's upper stage did not.

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[Reynold]

I gotta admit it'd be interesting to read how the insurance industry deals with "new space" now that private money is on the line, and how much that costs, or saves, the people who buy policies. It's not exactly "dark money", but it IS kind of an opaque part of that "cost of doing business" thing.

That would be fascinating information to have, what the insurance premiums are for various launch vehicles, from ISRO to Arian 6 to F9 to New Glen. The insurance companies must have good models for that, since money is on the line, in contrast to us forum speculators, but I'm sure it is VERY proprietary.

I would be willing to bet real money that you can get cheaper premiums per $1M of your satellite on a F9 than on a Vulcan right now, though. . .

 

[Reynold]

Normal no but given barge landing they may have indeed planned on the 2nd stage raising the inclination at apogee (SES2) except SES2 doesn't seem to have happened. It would have been nice if BO gave us specific details before the launch and then it would be easier to piece together what happened.

Though I wonder if they were launching the maximum number of satellites for a NG if they could afford this inclination change deltaV-wise? Since they were only launching one satellite they may have had the margin to plan to do an inclination change as part of the SES2 burn, just as SpaceX has margin for some flights to do a dogleg and/or RTLS, but not their max payload Starlink launches.

 

[Reynold]

Re: Insurance

SpaceNews, in their article covering BO's upper stage failure, had a link to a recent SEC filing by AST SpaceMobile in which details regarding insurance claims, premiums, coverages, and overall risk management, including time delays, involved with launching their payloads are listed in some detail.

The March 2, 2026 SEC relevant insurance information can be found on page 23:



This may clear things up about how AST SpaceMobile itself assesses risk management involved with launches and costs.

Edit: I tried to post the link to the SEC listing but it was blocked but I'll try again:

https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/0001780312/000178031226000006/asts-20251231.htm

I was able to read that link, but would describe that SEC listing as pretty vague; 3-20% of a satellite cost, (which itself could vary between $1M and $500+M, see Viasat or Defense Department birds), is a rather big range. There is also no description of how this insurance cost varies based on risk management or time delays. Mostly boilerplate SEC language of "this could get more or less expensive by some unknown amount".

Which is normal for a SEC filing, but not super helpful for us data nerds.