Thursday night was supposed to be a nonevent for Blue Origin’s latest iteration of its New Glenn rocket. Just a standard hotfire test, a test where the 322-foot-tall rocket’s seven engines are fired up to the booster stage while the rocket stays firmly on its Cape Canaveral Space Force Station launchpad.
But when the engines fired up, the flames that always plume out from the rocket began rising up its sides shortly before the rocket and its launchpad were engulfed in an enormous fireball of an explosion, lighting up the sky so that people from across Florida reported seeing it.
Or, as Blue Origin’s social media explained the incident: “We experienced an anomaly during today’s hotfire test. All personnel have been accounted for.”
The explosion reportedly caused extensive damage to both the launch equipment and
the lone launchpad that Blue Origin can utilize for its New Glenn rocket at Cape
Canaveral, which will likely take months, at best, to repair.
So, in other words, the plan to send up 48 satellites for Amazon’s Leo, the company’s internet satellite system that is attempting to compete with SpaceX’s Starlink, aboard the New Glenn next week is now going to require some tweaking, at best. And now there is also the question of how this will impact Blue Origin’s NASA plans and contracts.
Jeff Bezos, the owner of Blue Origin, which has been set up to become a competitor with Elon Musk’s SpaceX, particularly in the wake of Boeing’s Starliner 2024 mission debacle, didn’t have much more information regarding what actually caused the fiery mishap. “It’s too early to know the root cause but we’re already working to find it,” he wrote on social media. “Very rough day, but we’ll rebuild whatever needs rebuilding and get back to flying. It’s worth it.”
Musk struck a sympathetic tone with Bezos online. “Sorry to see this, I hope you recover quickly,” he wrote on X.
Who knows how sincere Musk is about that since this has put yet another would-be competitor in something of a bind. The New Glenn has had an uneven record so far, with two of its three previous flights having launched without incident since it started going up in January 2025. (The first two launches saw the loss of the rocket’s reusable booster while the third saw its payload of satellites end up too low in orbit, resulting in the satellites burning off in the atmosphere.)
This almost certainly throws a hitch in things for NASA officials. NASA’s plan to send astronauts back to the moon by 2028 hinges on SpaceX and Blue Origin being able to tote astronauts from lunar orbit to the surface of the moon. To do this, Blue Origin needed to see its New Glenn rockets go up for a number of launches ahead of the start of Artemis III – where astronauts are slated to practice docking the Orion space capsule with both SpaceX and Blue Origin’s landers while in orbit — next year.
On top of that it was only last Tuesday that NASA announced it had awarded contracts to Blue Origin for two New Glenn rockets to take lunar rovers to the moon for astronauts to tool around on during Artemis IV and Artemis V as soon as 2028. The company is also slated to launch a robotic lunar lander, Blue Moon Mark I, aboard a New Glenn later this year.
However, now that Blue Origin’s launchpad has sustained what appears to be significant damage it’s unclear if the company will be able to be part of Artemis III at all and it’s unclear how this could impact the other missions.
NASA Administrator Jason Isaacman acknowledged as much even as he tried to strike a hopeful tone about the whole situation. “Spaceflight is unforgiving and developing new heavy-lift launch capability is extraordinarily difficult,” he wrote on social media. “We will work with our partners to support a thorough investigation of this anomaly, assess near-term mission impacts, and get back to launching rockets.”
He went on to note that the plan is “to provide updates on any impacts to the Artemis
and Moon Base programs as it becomes available.”
So maybe Bezos and NASA will get together and pull off a set of repairs so fast that it’ll
seem like magic, and maybe they won’t. We’ll just have to wait and see.
