On Thursday, May 28th, 2026 the evening skies over Florida’s space coast were lit up by a massive explosion. Believed to be in the one kiloton of TNT range, visible from dozens of miles away and heard in Orlando, 90 kilometres from the coast, the detonation was that of a Blue Origin New Glenn launch vehicle. Not only did it vaporise parts of the rocket, it also dealt a significant blow to the company.
The New Glenn in question was a new vehicle, comprising a main engine system of 7 uprated BE-4 engines (currently the most powerful rocket motors in the world, rated at 2,844.5 kN of thrust each 100 kN more than the SpaceX Raptor 3) a new booster first stage called No, It’s Necessary (a reference to Christopher Nolan’s 2014 film Interstellar) and an upper stage and fairings, both without propellants or payload. It was undergoing a static fire test at Launch Complex 36 (LC-36), Canaveral Space Force Station, ahead of a planned launch scheduled for early June, New Glenn having been cleared to resume flights after being ground following the NG-3 mission in April, in which the rocket’s upper stage malfunctioned.
A static fire test is a routine in which a rocket is loaded with propellants, goes through a launch countdown and then very briefly fires its engines before shutting them down again. The intention is for the propellant systems and engines to “clear their throats” (so to speak), ready for the upcoming launch. To this end, the rocket was loaded with some 1,200 tonnes of liquid oxygen and liquid methane.
The exact cause of the explosion has obviously yet to be determined. The first signs of trouble came as the static fire countdown reached its end. The water deluge sound suppression system was active, smothering the launch pad in hundreds of thousands of litres of water to prevent the acoustic vibrations generated by the seven BE-4 engines being deflected from the launch pad up onto the vehicle and damaging it. As a result, it is very difficult to see from the available video footage as to what happened next: whether the engines fired as expected with an explosion following, or whether the complete engine unit at the base of the rocket detonated on ignition.
What is clear is there was a destructive event at the base of the rocket giving rise to an initial fireball rolling flames up the sides of the vehicle. There was then a second explosion towards the top of the vehicle, roughly at, or just below, the bottom end of the upper stage – possibly an initial explosion of the liquid methane tank. However, both of these explosions were rapidly dwarfed by the vehicle’s entire first stage exploding, likely as a result of the liquid oxygen tank rupturing. This generated a mushroom fireball which rose into the evening sky with debris from the rocket being hurled up and outwards over considerable distances (so far in fact, that parts of the vehicle ended up scattered over the local beaches, caused fires in the coastal scrubland and came down off-shore, prompting several public safety warnings telling the public not to touch or move any debris they might find as it could be toxic).
The loss of a launch vehicle is obviously not an insignificant event – and fortunately, there was no loss of life. However, for Blue Origin, vehicle loss is somewhat secondary to the devastation wrought on LC-36.
This facility, leased from (at the time) the USAF in 2015, was completely rebuilt by Blue Origin at a cost of US $1 billion to be the only launch facility capable of handing New Glenn (a second launch facility planned for Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, has yet to break ground). With this explosion, much of LC-36 has been either completely destroyed or suffered significant damage, and until it is rebuilt New Glenn will not fly, no matter how quickly the cause of the explosion is identified and rectified (assuming it lies within the rocket).
Nor is this simply a matter of clearing the site and starting reconstruction. Rockets are nasty vehicles filled with things that can put a person in hospital – or worse – if not handled correctly. So before any reconstruction can begin, there will need to be a in-situ investigation across the site to clean it of any harmful materials whilst also looking for any clues as to what might have caused the explosion and recovering any surviving parts of the vehicle which might yield their own clues as to a possible cause. Such an investigation + clean-up is a non-trivial matter.
For example, in 2016, a SpaceX Falcon 9 exploded on LC-40 at Canaveral during a static fire test, completely destroying itself and its payload. It took over a year to get the pad back into operational order – the first 4+ months of which involved just such an investigation and clean-up. And that event was much smaller than the New Glenn explosion, with the pad and its infrastructure subjected to far less overall destruction.
By contrast and as shown above, the New Glenn explosion has completely wiped out the launch pad and its immediate infrastructure, brought down one of the two 183-metre tall lightning conductor towers and severely damaged the other, and utterly destroyed the transporter erector. The latter was the 1,800 tonne vehicle / platform used to move New Glenn rockets horizontally out of the vehicle and payload integration building a short distance from the launch pad and then, with the assistance of hydraulic actuators at the pad, raise itself, the rocket and the launch platform to a vertical position, and then act as the launch tower for the rocket.
In addition, it appears that the vehicle and payload integration facility close to the pad has suffered significant structural damage. Some reports state this damage extends to equipment and systems inside the building, including the twice-flown New Glenn first stage, Never Tell Me the Odds. However, this latter point was without formal confirmation at the time of writing.
Given all of this, rebuilding and recommission LC-36 is liable to be a lengthy process. Frankly, if all of the statements on the extent of additional damage are correct, it’s hard to see the complex resuming launch operations before the end of 2027 at the earliest.
Impacts
If LC-36 is out of commission for more than a year, then the overall impact is enormous for both Blue Origin and potentially for NASA’s Artemis programme. As it is, it has already put paid (for now, at least) to a pair of vital precursor missions related to Artemis Blue Origin was due to fly later in 2026 and early 2027.
These are the Blue Moon MK1 Pathfinder missions. They were both intended to deliver science payloads to the Moon – in the case of the second, NASA’s VIPER automated rover (which is the unluckiest lucky rover NASA has built, having lost its ride, was then practically cancelled, then resurrected and now is once more without a launch vehicle for the foreseeable future, and so could face cancellation again). More particularly, both missions would have allowed Blue Origin to check-out systems critical to both the Blue Moon MK1 cargo lander and its “big brother”, the Blue Moon MK2 crew lander (called the Human Landing System (HLS) by NASA).
Blue Moon MK1 and Blue Moon MK2 are set to be cornerstones of the Artemis programme, and by testing the systems common to both – the BE-7 engine system, the cryogenic fluid power and propulsion systems, avionics, continuous downlink communications, and precision landing system with an accuracy within 100 metres – during the Pathfinder mission, Blue Origin hoped validate their use aboard both landers and specifically move development the MK2 HLS vehicle significantly forward.
A further mission now impacted by the New Glenn explosion – and somewhat linked to the Pathfinder missions – is that of Artemis 3.
Due to take place at the end of 2027, this is intended to provide NASA astronauts with the opportunity to test one or other (or preferably both) of the HLS systems being developed (the other being SpaceX’s Starship-derived vehicle) and evaluate their use and general fitness for purpose. Taken together, the Pathfinder missions (if successful) with their testing of the systems mentioned above, combined with a hands-on test of the actual Blue Moon MK2 HLS would likely provide NASA with a degree of confidence in the Blue Origin lander, possibly to the extend of selecting it over the SpaceX HLS for Artemis 4, the first mission to return astronauts to the surface of the Moon.
Clearly, with things now being what they are, neither of the Pathfinder missions will likely to take place within the next year (at least), and Blue Origin are unlikely to be able to participate in Artemis 3. The first of these points means that Blue Origin lose a possible advantage they hold over SpaceX when it comes to vehicle selection for Artemis 4. In terms of the latter, NASA face something of a quandary: do they keep things as is, and hope Blue Origin can somehow meet the current Artemis 3 schedule? Or they seek to push Artemis 3 back to 2028 in order to ensure they can properly evaluate both HLS vehicles from the relatively safe location of Earth orbit, or do they go ahead with testing only the SpaceX vehicle and introduce the Blue Origin vehicle without any on-orbit with Artemis 5 or Artemis 6?
The answer to these questions is far from clear – although one would hope common sense would lean NASA (political pressure allowing) towards delaying Artemis 3 until 2028 to give Blue Origin the opportunity to partake in the mission. Indeed, given doubts the agency has voiced about SpaceX’s overall ability to have a HLS system ready for Artemis 3 (which led to Artemis 3 being moved from mid- to late-2027), moving the mission back to 2028 might be seen beneficial overall. However, such a delay will impact on Artemis 4, and any attempt to slip this back into 2029 could meet with significant political resistance.
There is one other potential – but significant, if it happens – impact that might be felt with the loss of the NG-4 vehicle, and it lies not with Blue Origin or NASA, but with United Launch Alliance (ULA).
ULA uses two 2,460 kN “standard” BE-4 engines on the Vulcan-Centaur rocket’s first stage. As such, if the cause of the the loss of the NG-4 vehicle is found lie within the BE-4 (and not restricted to the uprated 2,844.5 kN version), the FAA could order a grounding of the ULA vehicle until such time that Blue origin has rectified whatever the issue might be. Time will very much tell on that.
A (Very) Small Consolation?
There is however, one potentially small consolation for Blue Origin after all this.
In November 2025, the company announced it was to develop a very significant upgrade to New Glenn: the 9×4, which it was planning to test fly some time in 2027 (a rather ambitious time frame even considering the commonality of hardware and software between it and the current New Glenn).
This new version of New Glenn (called the 9×4 on account that it will use 9 BE-7 engines on the first stage and 4 BE-3Us on the upper stage)is truly massive, as per the graphic to the right. What is particularly significant about this vehicle is the fact Blue Origin plan to have it capable of delivering 14 tonnes of payload directly to geostationary orbit (GEO) or 20 tonnes to the Moon, both with the first stage reusable – capabilities beyond the reach of SpaceX’s Starship without it being “refuelled” in low Earth orbit.
And why is this a potential consolation for Blue Origin? Well, New Glenn 9×4 itself actually isn’t; it’s what comes with it that is.
In order to operate the new giant, the company needs to significantly upgrade LC-36 in several key areas – such as the pad itself and the infrastructure within / under it to deal with things like the vehicle’s increased mass, the significantly greater output from its engines at lift-off, the need for an enhanced deluge system to deal with higher acoustical issues, etc. This work would have had to be undertaken whilst the complex remained able to launch New Glenn 7×2 (with some 7 further flights originally planned for 2026, and another 4 in early 2027).
As a result of this incident, LC-36 can now be rebuilt from the ground up to fully support both 7×2 and 9×4 launches without having to juggle construction needs around launch schedules. True, it’s not that much of a consolation in the scheme of things; but at this point in time, I’m betting Blue Origin will take what small measures of comfort it can get.
It’s been a good while since I offered any updates on the work of NASA’s Curiosity rover on Mars, which is a bit of a shame given it was my reporting on Curiosity’s arrival and mission on Mars which eventually morphed into Space Sunday.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 