What The Blue Origin Rocket Explosion Means for America's Return to the Moon
· Time
It was never going to be pretty if hundreds of thousands of gallons of highly flammable liquid oxygen, hydrogen, and methane suddenly erupted. But that’s what happened at 9:00 p.m. EDT last night at launch complex 36 on the grounds of the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, when a New Glenn rocket, built by the Jeff Bezos-owned Blue Origin aerospace company, ate itself in a massive fireball during a test of its seven first-stage engines. The giant explosion hurled flames, gas, and debris hundreds of feet in the air, utterly destroying the 322-ft. rocket and partly destroying the launch complex itself.
“All personnel are accounted for and safe,” wrote Bezos in a post on X at 10:13 p.m. “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. It’s worth it.”
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“NASA is aware of the anomaly that occurred tonight at Launch Complex 36 involving Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station,” posted NASA administrator Jared Isaacman shortly after. “Spaceflight is unforgiving, and developing new heavy-lift launch capability is extraordinarily difficult.”
“Sorry to see this, I hope you recover quickly,” read a sparing post by Elon Musk, boss of rival rocket company SpaceX.
That hope—not just for Blue Origin but for NASA’s larger push to have human beings back on the moon by 2028—may be a vain one. It’s hard to calculate fully less than 24 hours after the accident how big a setback the nation’s lunar project will suffer, but the odds are it will be considerable.
“NASA has planned Artemis on a ‘success-oriented’ schedule. That's NASA speak for setting very ambitious target dates for various milestones,” said John Logsdon, professor emeritus at George Washington University and the founder and long-time director of the school’s Space Policy Institute, in an email to TIME. “This incident certainly throws a monkey wrench in the Artemis schedule, which was probably not achievable even before the explosion.”
There’s no overstating how much NASA’s Artemis moon exploration program depends on SpaceX and Blue Origin delivering the goods. So far neither has covered itself in glory.
In 2021, NASA tapped SpaceX to adapt the towering 150-ft. upper stage of its 407-ft Starship rocket to serve as the program’s lunar landing craft—a vehicle prosaically named the Human Landing System (HLS). The entire Starship program, however, is far behind schedule, with 12 launches of the rocket in the past three years—some successful, some not, none qualifying the giant machine as anywhere close to operational. The HLS upper stage, meantime, has not yet been fully designed or built. That’s a problem, since shortly before the rousingly successful April flight of Artemis II—during which four astronauts visited the lunar neighborhood for the first time in nearly 54 years—Isaacman announced that Artemis III would fly late next year, testing SpaceX’s HLS with a crew in low-Earth orbit. But if Starship’s first stage isn’t flight-worthy yet, its landing craft will never get off the ground.
Blue Origin, meantime, has been developing an HLS of its own, dubbed the Blue Moon Mark II. To hedge NASA’s bets, Isaacman decided to include that spacecraft—provided it is flight-ready in time—to participate in Artemis III as well, setting up the prospect of a may-the-best-ship-win mission during which the space agency will fly and test a pair of landers. That prospect, however, is now very much in question since Blue Origin must rely on a functional New Glenn to get a Mark II off the ground.
“If the New Glenn booster is out of service for some months,” says Logsdon, “either the Artemis 3 schedule has to slip or NASA has to move ahead with sole dependence on the lander version of the SpaceX Starship. That option has its own problems. Starship is currently grounded after multiple problems on its last flight and the Starship lander version has never flown.”
Launching an HLS is not the only job NASA counted on New Glenn to perform. The company was slated to test a cargo version of the Mark II in a lunar landing mission before the end of 2026. Just two days before the explosion, NASA also announced that it had inked an agreement with Blue Origin to launch a pair of New Glenns that would carry rovers to the lunar surface which would be awaiting crews of Artemis III, IV, V, and beyond. Those deals too may be in trouble.
“NASA's plans for a Moon base are heavily dependent on using the New Glenn booster,” says Logsdon. “This incident suggests that those plans at this point are basically an aspiration rather than being realistically achievable in the next few years.”
Rebuilding from the Thursday disaster will not be easy. Unlike SpaceX, which has three different launch pads in Florida, Blue Origin only has launch complex 36. A full assessment of the damage to the pad has not been conducted yet, but photographic and video images reveal that the mobile tower that brings the rocket out to the pad, stands it upright, and serves as its gantry was destroyed in the blast, as was one of two lightning-rod towers. The damage to the concrete apron is not yet known; nor is the condition of the deluge system that pours up to a million gallons of water on the pad during launch to protect it from the heat of New Glenn’s engines and dampen the acoustical shock of a liftoff. All of that will be part of the upcoming damage assessment.
“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,” added Isaacman in his post. “We will provide information on any impacts to the Artemis and Moon Base programs as it becomes available.”
How long the recovery will take is impossible to know. On Sept. 1, 2016, SpaceX experienced a similar but smaller accident, when a Falcon 9 rocket carrying a communications satellite exploded on the launch pad. The company was grounded for three and a half months while engineers sought out the cause of the blast—which was traced to a rupture in a helium tank. The launch pad, however, was out of commission for a full year. That was not fatal to SpaceX operations since even then the company had another launch pad at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California; Blue Origin is limited to just the one pad. If Launch Complex 36 is similarly out of operation until the middle of 2027, it’s hard to imagine how New Glenn can prove itself in time to participate in Artemis III—assuming Blue Origin can also get its Mark II HLS built by then.
Yesterday’s accident called to mind nothing so much as the July 3, 1969 attempted launch of the old Soviet Union’s N1 moon rocket. Rivalling NASA’s Saturn 5 in height and thrust, the N1 had nowhere near the Saturn’s reliability. On the day of the launch it had barely cleared the gantry when it erupted in a titanic blast that wiped out both the rocket and launch pad. The accident effectively knocked the USSR out of the space race. Seventeen days later, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped on the moon. Blue Origin, SpaceX, and NASA have a lot more than 17 days to set things to rights—but they have a lot of work ahead of them too.