Blue Origin

Blue Origin makes the BE-4 engine, which powers both its own New Glenn and ULA's Vulcan, along with the New Shepard suborbital vehicle, the Blue Moon lunar landers and the Blue Ring transfer stage. New Glenn is a heavy-lift rocket with a reusable first stage, and the company landed one in November 2025, then flew a booster a second time and recovered it again in April 2026, which nobody outside SpaceX had managed.

Twenty-six years of Jeff Bezos's money has bought the freedom to develop slowly and to own everything: engine, booster, upper stage, tug and lander. Amazon has reserved twenty-four New Glenn flights for its Leo constellation and NASA has bought Blue Moon for both cargo and crewed lunar delivery, so the order book is real even where the flight record is thin.

Three orbital flights in twenty-six years, and the third stranded its customer. NG-3 recovered its booster, but a problem with the upper stage left AST SpaceMobile's satellite in an orbit it could not operate from, and it was deorbited. Then on 28 May 2026, during a static fire ahead of the fourth flight, the first stage and its fuelled second stage were destroyed in a fireball at LC-36, the only operational New Glenn pad. That came one day after regulators cleared the vehicle to return to flight, and about a week before it was to carry 48 Amazon satellites. No root cause had been published a month later. Blue Origin says the pad will be back by the end of 2026 while industry estimates run beyond a year, and the second pad is not ready until late 2027. Everything queues behind that one pad, including Blue Moon, which has still never flown.