The New Glenn rocket from the aerospace company Blue Origin, founded by billionaire Jeff Bezos, exploded on Thursday night at Launch Complex 36 of the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida during a pre-launch static fire test for an upcoming orbital launch.
The explosion generated a massive fireball visible from a distance and was captured live on video by Spaceflight Now, whose broadcast recorded the exact moment of the blast.
"Oh, no. Oh, my. We just destroyed the platform," one of the commentators was heard saying at the moment of impact.
Blue Origin confirmed that all personnel had been evacuated before the incident and that no injuries were reported.
According to a report by EFE, the Brevard County Sheriff, Wayne Ivey, stated that there was no danger to the community and that the contained fire was expected to extinguish itself.
Bezos reacted on his account on X with a message acknowledging the seriousness of the incident but promised to move forward.
"All personnel are accounted for and safe. It's too early to know the root cause, but we are already working to find it. It's been a very tough day, but we will rebuild what needs to be rebuilt and we will fly again. It's worth it," he stated.
NASA administrator Jared Isaacman announced that the agency will collaborate in investigating the anomaly and will evaluate the impact on short-term missions.
"We will work with our partners to support a thorough investigation of this anomaly, assess the impact on short-term missions, and relaunch rockets," he wrote on X.
Isaacman also emphasized that "space flights do not forgive mistakes, and developing a new heavy-lift launch capability is extraordinarily difficult."
NASA will also provide information on the impact of the disaster on the Artemis program and the project for establishing a future lunar base, in which Blue Origin plays a central role.
The incident represents a new setback for the company, which just weeks prior, on April 19, had experienced another serious issue during the NG-3 mission: a failure in one of the engines of the second stage left the BlueBird 7 satellite from AST SpaceMobile in an incorrect orbit, forcing its deorbiting and triggering an investigation by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
The destroyed rocket was set to participate in upcoming satellite deployment missions, including devices from the Kuiper project, Amazon's space internet network that Bezos is promoting to compete with Starlink from SpaceX.
The LC-36 is currently the only operational launch pad for the New Glenn, which exacerbates the impact of the incident: any significant damage to the platform could indefinitely delay upcoming launches.
The explosion comes at a particularly delicate time: just three days earlier, NASA announced that it will send the first uncrewed lander from Blue Origin -the Mark One Endurance module- to the Moon between September and November 2026, as the first mission of the Moon Base program, with a budget of 20 billion dollars over seven years.
Blue Origin has been developing the New Glenn for nearly a decade with the aim of competing in the heavy-lift launch market dominated by SpaceX, whose Falcon and Starship vehicles currently lead commercial and government missions in the United States.
The program's timeline includes the inaugural flight in January 2025 and NASA's ESCAPADE mission in November of that same year, followed by two consecutive setbacks in 2026 that now call the company's lunar schedule into question.
Filed under: