Bezos’ Blue Origin Rocket Explodes On Launch Pad Engine Test
Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space company suffered a major setback on Thursday night when its New Glenn rocket exploded in a massive fireball on a launch pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida U.S. during a routine engine-firing test.
The explosion occurred around 9pm local time as engineers were counting down to a brief test firing of the New Glenn’s seven methane-fuelled BE-4 first stage engines, with the 188-foot-tall first stage becoming enveloped in a rapidly growing fire before the 86-foot-tall upper stage tilted and began to fall.
The rocket was destroyed entirely and as the smoke cleared, the erector-gantry used to move the New Glenn from its hangar to the pad was no longer visible, with one of two tall lightning towers also apparently destroyed and multiple fires burning across the severely damaged pad.
No one was hurt. “All personnel are accounted for and safe. It’s too early to know the root cause but we’re already working to find it. Very rough day, but we’ll rebuild whatever needs rebuilding and get back to flying. Rockets are hard,” Bezos said in a post on X.
Blue Origin had been preparing the New Glenn for its fourth launch, which was slated to deploy a batch of satellites for Amazon’s Leo constellation, a rival internet satellite network to Elon Musk’s SpaceX Starlink, with none of the satellites on board at the time of the explosion.
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Just two days before the explosion, NASA had awarded Blue Origin a contract to launch the first of three missions to begin construction of a Moon Base on the lunar surface, due to take place later in 2026, as part of the agency’s Artemis programme to return American astronauts to the Moon in 2028.
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said the agency was aware of the incident and would provide information on any impacts to the Artemis and Moon Base programmes as it became available, saying “spaceflight is unforgiving, and developing new heavy-lift launch capability is extraordinarily difficult.”
The New Glenn had already been grounded in April after it left a satellite in the wrong orbit because of an engine failure, making Thursday’s explosion the second major setback for the rocket within two months and raising serious questions about Blue Origin’s ability to keep pace with SpaceX in the rapidly growing commercial space industry.