Blue Origin’s New Glenn mega-rocket simply exploded throughout testing at a launch web site in Cape Canaveral, Florida, in accordance to live streams from NASASpaceFlight.com and SpaceFlight Now. Blue Origin later confirmed the explosion.
Jeff Bezos’ house firm was performing a static fireplace take a look at forward of an anticipated fourth launch of the brand new rocket within the coming weeks, which was supposed to hold Amazon Leo web satellites to house. Blue Origin said in an X submit Thursday night that “[a]ll personnel have been accounted for.” The corporate didn’t say what went fallacious, solely that an “anomaly” occurred. NASA, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), and the House Drive didn’t instantly reply to requests for remark.
The explosion possible means Blue Origin must pause the New Glenn rocket program for an prolonged time period whereas it really works via what went fallacious. Blue Origin had been planning to try as many as 12 launches of New Glenn this 12 months, after the corporate spent round a decade creating it in an try to compete with Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
The corporate can also be supposed to assist energy NASA’s Artemis missions to the moon, with the company highlighting Blue Origin’s anticipated role in that program earlier this week.
“Most unlucky. Rockets are laborious,” Elon Musk wrote on X shortly after the explosion.
The explosion comes just some weeks after Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket flew for the third time ever. That mission suffered its personal failure when the New Glenn higher stage didn’t put an AST SpaceMobile satellite tv for pc into orbit, inflicting a complete lack of the mission. Simply final week, the FAA cleared New Glenn to fly once more after Blue Origin accomplished an investigation into the reason for the failure.
A really new rocket
Blue Origin has spent years creating New Glenn whereas it used its New Shepard program to check out smaller-scale sub-orbital rockets. Whereas New Shepard has ferried a reasonably common cadence of rich individuals and celebrities (together with some science missions) to the sting of house, Blue Origin was consistently working within the background to develop a rocket that might put actual business payloads — like massive satellites — into orbit.
That work lastly got here to a head in January 2025, when the corporate flew New Glenn for the primary time.
New Glenn seemed to be a reasonably profitable rocket proper off the bat. It reached orbit throughout that first flight, although the booster stage exploded earlier than Blue Origin might try to land it on a drone ship within the ocean.
Blue Origin was much more profitable with New Glenn’s second flight, although, in November 2025. Throughout that mission the corporate launched twin spacecraft to Mars for NASA. Blue Origin additionally landed its first booster stage throughout New Glenn’s second mission.
That allowed the corporate to re-fly the booster on New Glenn’s third mission, displaying not solely the flexibility to get better the primary stage, however refurbish it for re-use — a vital step in decreasing the general price of working a launch enterprise.
The re-used rocket booster had no issues flying once more, and even landed a second time on one in every of Blue Origin’s drone ships, throughout New Glenn’s third mission in April 2026. However the firm skilled a cryogenic failure within the higher stage throughout mission three, which led to the lack of the satellite tv for pc.
This upcoming fourth mission was alleged to be the primary of 24 launches that Amazon has contracted Blue Origin for. Amazon is at present constructing out a competitor to SpaceX’s Starlink satellite tv for pc web community, which it calls Leo. On Wednesday, Amazon touted its skill to depend on Blue Origin to construct the community, calling New Glenn a “reusable, heavy-lift rocket.”
This story is creating. Test again for updates.
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