Blue Origin simply hit a hurdle on its solution to the moon.
The corporate’s highly effective New Glenn rocket exploded throughout a routine prelaunch engine take a look at at Florida’s Cape Canaveral Area Pressure Station on Thursday night time (Could 28), creating an enormous fireball that lit up the darkish Area Coast skies.
No person was injured, Blue Origin mentioned in an replace on X on Thursday night time. However harm to the pad — Launch Advanced 36 (LC-36) — could possibly be in depth, judging by the extent of the explosion, which a number of rocket-watchers captured on video.
Blue Origin’s New Glenn simply blew up at LC-36 whereas making an attempt to Static Hearth forward of NG-4.https://t.co/tANS0dWyIH pic.twitter.com/PztxFoBqIwCould 29, 2026
The accident might have huge implications for Blue Origin, NASA and the US’ moon plans.
Blue Origin, which Amazon’s Jeff Bezos based again in 2000, sees the 320-foot-tall (98 meters) New Glenn as its launch workhorse, a powerhouse rocket that can assist humanity set up a foothold away from Earth.
Certainly, New Glenn is the rocket journey for Blue Origin’s Blue Moon, one of many two personal automobiles (together with SpaceX’s Starship) that NASA chosen to land astronauts on the moon for its Artemis program.
And the company introduced earlier this week that Blue Moon will land two personal lunar rovers on the lunar floor — missions which are key to the buildout of NASA’s deliberate moon base close to the south pole. The company desires at the least a kind of rovers to be on the moon earlier than the primary crewed Artemis mission (Artemis 4) touches down, a milestone focused for late 2028.
However Blue Moon is meant to move to the moon significantly earlier than that. Blue Origin is gearing as much as ship a robotic prototype of the car, known as Blue Moon Mark 1, to the lunar floor later this yr, to display the car’s capabilities.
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman addressed the New Glenn explosion on Thursday night time, displaying how necessary the rocket is to the company’s plans going ahead.
“Spaceflight is unforgiving, and creating new heavy-lift launch functionality is very tough,” Isaacman mentioned in an X put up. “We’ll work with our companions to assist a radical investigation of this anomaly, assess near-term mission impacts, and get again to launching rockets. 
We’ll present info on any impacts to the Artemis and Moon Base packages because it turns into accessible.”
New Glenn has flown simply 3 times up to now, and issues have not all the time gone swimmingly. For instance, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration grounded the rocket briefly after its third flight, which occurred on April 19. Throughout that mission, New Glenn didn’t deploy its payload, the BlueBird 7 communications satellite tv for pc, into the right orbit.
Thursday’s explosion occurred throughout a “hotfire” engine take a look at meant to clear the trail for New Glenn’s fourth flight, which was speculated to deploy 49 satellites for Amazon’s nascent broadband constellation. That mission was scheduled to fly on June 4.
LC-36 is presently the one pad that hosts New Glenn launches, so in depth harm to the pad would possible preserve the rocket grounded for some time.
