Ray Blanco:

Blue Origin’s New Glenn Put a Customer Satellite in the Wrong Orbit During Its Third Launch

Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin successfully re-used one of its New Glenn rockets for the first time ever on Sunday, but the company failed at its primary mission: delivering a communications satellite to orbit for customer AST SpaceMobile.

AST SpaceMobile issued a statement Sunday afternoon that the upper stage of the New Glenn rocket placed BlueBird 7 satellite into an orbit that was “lower than planned.” The satellite successfully separated from the rocket and powered on, the company said, but the altitude is too low “to sustain operations” and will now have to be de-orbited – left to burn up in the atmosphere of Earth.

The cost of the loss of the satellite is covered by AST SpaceMobile’s insurance policy, according to the company, and there are successive BlueBird satellites that will be completed in around a month. AST SpaceMobile has contracts with more than just Blue Origin, and the company said it expects to be able to launch 45 more to space by the end of 2026.

But this represents the first major failure for Blue Origin’s New Glenn program, which only made its first flight in January 2025 after more than a decade in development.

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Greg Guenthner:

Bitcoin Holds at $75,000 After U.S.–Iran Ceasefire Collapses

Early today, bitcoin hovered around $75,000: down 0.2% on the day but up 6.3% over the week. Over the weekend the U.S. seized an Iranian vessel, and Tehran reasserted control of the Strait of Hormuz.

Ether slipped 1% to $2300. Among the top ten cryptocurrencies by market value, only HYPE fell markedly, down 4.7%. The rest shed less than 1%. Crypto-market liquidations reached $419 million over the past 24 hours, with $218 million from long positions.

On April 17, Tehran declared the Strait of Hormuz “fully open”. By April 19 the situation had flipped: President Donald Trump threatened to destroy all power stations and bridges in Iran if talks fail. The other side signalled it could skip a second negotiation round while the United States maintains a naval blockade.

This is the fourth Middle East–related shock that crypto has weathered relatively calmly, analysts at CoinDesk noted. Each fresh escalation elicits a more muted response from bitcoin, even as oil and equities continue to react sharply.

Experts reckon digital-asset markets have already priced in the main risks, while traditional markets are still catching up.

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Davis Wilson:

A Humanoid Robot Sprints Past the Human Half-Marathon World Record in Beijing Race

A humanoid robot that won a half-marathon race for robots in Beijing on Sunday ran faster than the human world record in a show of China’s technological leaps.

The winner from Honor, a Chinese smartphone maker, completed the 21-kilometer (13-mile) race in 50 minutes and 26 seconds, according to a WeChat post by the Beijing Economic-Technological Development Area, also known as Beijing E-Town, where the race kicked off.

That was faster than the human world record holder, Uganda’s Jacob Kiplimo, who finished the same distance in about 57 minutes in March at the Lisbon road race.

The performance by the robot marked a significant step forward from last year’s inaugural race, during which the winning robot finished in 2 hours, 40 minutes and 42 seconds.

Du Xiaodi, Honor’s test development engineer, said his team was happy with the results. Du said its robot design was modeled on outstanding human athletes, with long legs of about 95 cm (around 37 inches), and was equipped with what he called a powerful liquid-cooling system, which was largely developed in-house.

“Some of these technologies might be transferred to other areas. For example, structural reliability and liquid-cooling technology could be applied in future industrial scenarios,” Du said.

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