(Rob Pegoraro)
Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket, a heavy-lift vehicle, exploded Thursday night during a ground test, torching a large part of its launch infrastructure.
At 9 p.m. Eastern, just as a static-fire test of New Glenn’s seven BE-4 methane-fueled engines appeared to begin at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s Launch Complex 36, explosions erupted around the booster, engulfed the upper stage and launch tower, and sent a fiery mushroom cloud into the dark sky.
A minute later, the sound of that detonation—a sharp thud—could be heard on NASASpaceflight’s livestream of Space Coast operations.
This was supposed to be a predictable exercise from Blue after three successful New Glenn missions.
The heavy-lift vehicle reached orbit on its first try in January of 2025—a feat that had eluded every other debut attempt of a privately funded, clean-sheet-design rocket in the West. Its second launch saw the first stage successfully landing on a platform in the Atlantic Ocean, allowing that booster to fly again on the third launch, in April.
That last flight saw that first stage launch and land intact, though the upper stage failed to put an AST SpaceMobile broadband-to-phone satellite in the correct orbit. That was not a good look for Jeff Bezos’s space enterprise, but Thursday’s mishap appears much worse—notwithstanding the measured language used to report it.
“We experienced an anomaly during today's hotfire test,” Blue Origin posted on X at 9:31 p.m. “All personnel have been accounted for. We will provide updates as we learn more.”
Bezos chimed in with a post 42 minutes later. “It’s too early to know the root cause but we’re already working to find it,” his post read in part. “Very rough day, but we’ll rebuild whatever needs rebuilding and get back to flying. It’s worth it.”
After the destroyed infrastructure on the ground, the most immediate casualty is Amazon’s aspirations of getting its Leo low-Earth-orbit satellite broadband constellation in initial service this year. New Glenn’s fourth launch was set to deliver 48 Leo satellites and kick off an accelerated launch cadence.
Amazon has launch contracts on almost every other available rocket: United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V and Vulcan, Arianespace’s Ariane 6, and SpaceX’s Falcon 9. But those vehicles can’t loft as many Leo satellites as New Glenn; Atlas V is also nearing retirement, while Vulcan uses the same BE-3 first-stage engines as New Glenn and has exhibited repeated issues with its solid-rocket boosters.
Amazon plans to compete with SpaceX’s Starlink by providing terrestrial broadband via compact antennas and has signed up Delta Air Lines and JetBlue as in-flight Wi-Fi customers. All those plans just hit a snag.
AST’s ambitions to offer direct-to-phone broadband—with AT&T and Verizon as investors and customers—were also set back. AST only has six production BlueBird satellites in orbit and is set to have another three delivered by a Falcon 9 in June, but with New Glenn (named after John Glenn, the first American astronaut to orbit the Earth) out of the picture, AST’s 2026 goal of a 45-satellite constellation looks gone.
Next, there’s NASA, which awarded Blue a $3.4 billion contract in 2023 to develop its Blue Moon Mark 2 lunar lander as an alternative to SpaceX’s Starship-based Human Landing System for its Artemis moon project.
That lander, the smaller Blue Moon Mark 1 cargo-only lunar lander, and a newer, upgraded, crew-capable version of Mark 1, which you could think of as Blue Moon Mark 1, all require New Glenn. That makes Blue’s plans to have its smaller crewed lander ready for an orbital flight test in 2027 on NASA’s planned Artemis III mission look pretty much doomed.
(Starship HLS has itself fallen well behind the schedule NASA hoped for when it awarded SpaceX that $2.89 billion contract in 2021; after 12 launches in a campaign that began in April 2023, Starship has yet to reach orbit, undermining plans to have HLS ready for Artemis III next year. Meanwhile, China continues to advance its own plans for a crewed landing on the Moon by 2030.)
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who has seen his share of on-pad calamities—including a Falcon 9 explosion in September of 2016 and a Starship upper-stage explosion last June—replied sympathetically to Bezos on X: “Ad astra per aspera,” Latin for “to the stars through difficulties” and an often-invoked phrase at NASA.
The space agency’s administrator Jared Isaacman posted his own note on X Thursday night. “Spaceflight is unforgiving, and developing new heavy-lift launch capability is extraordinarily difficult,” he wrote in part. “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."