One of two second stage engines misbehaved, administration must sign off report before flights resume

Blue Origin's New Glenn loss of a satellite has been classed as a "mishap" by the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), triggering a mandatory investigation.

The flight - the third launch of the New Glenn rocket - had a split result: the first stage performed flawlessly, landing and recovering as planned, but the second stage fell short - literally. AST SpaceMobile's BlueBird 7 satellite was left in an orbit too low to be useful, and the customer wrote it off shortly after.

Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp took to X, Elon Musk's social media mouthpiece, to acknowledge the failure:

"We clearly didn't deliver the mission our customer wanted, and our team expects," he said, before offering an early diagnosis.

"Early data suggest that on our second GS2 burn, one of the BE-3U engines didn't produce sufficient thrust to reach our target orbit."

"GS2" is the name of the ...