Well,New Glenn made it to orbit. The lunch was spectacular.
Unfortunately, they did lose the first stage. The three middle engines ignited, but after that they lost data. I don’t know whether it exploded or if it crashed into the ocean. As I recall, SpaceX didn’t get everything right the first time either.
Still, Blue Origin made it’s main goal, which was getting into orbit safely. Gotta congratulate them for that.
The booster is the New Glenn, so that actually failed during descent and landing, that was disappointing, and expensive. But as Musk said years ago during a SpaceX RUD event, “space is hard”. :^) When the velocity and altitude numbers for the booster froze, I thought, loss of signal, may still be okay.
Then one of the techies’ voices came on and said telemetry was still coming from both stages, and there was the intermittent cheering from the assembled nerds in the background. It still seemed like it may be okay.
But after a minute I said to myself, they lost the booster. Then the numbers went to zero.
Then the ‘person on the hallway’ interviews started and every one of them was fired up about having *finally* (my word) put something into orbit. At long last one of the mission narrators admitted that the booster had been lost.
That loss was a disappointment to me too. My guess was and is that engine restart led to a catastrophic failure somewhere in the propulsion system and the booster fell to the water in various pieces. Cross our fingers that it didn’t take out their landing barge.