Posted on 05/29/2026 7:04:04 AM PDT by Red Badger
Via the Associated Press, a familiar (if dispiriting) incident in space exploration:
A rocket belonging to Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin exploded during a test at the launch pad Thursday night, shaking nearby homes and briefly painting the sky orange.
Blue Origin said its New Glenn rocket exploded during an engine-firing test being conducted ahead of a satellite launch planned for next week. No one was hurt, according to officials at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.
Watching this footage, it's kind of incredible that "no one was hurt!"
VIDEO AT LINK.............
The blowup from other angles is just as unbelievable:
VIDEOS AT LINK............
As the AP reports, Blue Origin "had been on track to launch a prototype lunar lander to the moon on a flight test this fall," though I think we can safely say that's probably been pushed back a bit.
Rocket explosions are part of the learning process with any new launch vehicle. You expect them to happen.
But in this case, not only was it a complete surprise given how far along the New Glenn program is in development, but it also took Blue Origin's only launch pad out of commission.
From Eric Berger at ARS Technica:
No one was injured during the failure, which sources said caused extensive damage to the company's large and complex launch site. During a pad failure in 2016, with the smaller Falcon 9 rocket, it took SpaceX more than a year to rebuild its seriously damaged Space Launch Complex-40 pad.
...
This is the worst disaster in the history of Blue Origin, founded in 2000.
The issue is that Blue Origin had already been selected as an integral part of NASA's moon base plan. Now their only launch pad was shredded by the largest rocket explosion since a Soviet explosion half a century ago.
It takes time to rebuild such things.
Early reports from sources suggest that the launch infrastructure at LC-36A is severely damaged. A source indicated that one of the lightning towers may not be salvageable, and that the transporter-erector may also be damaged beyond repair.
Another launch pad was already under construction nearby, but the company will be unlikely to launch another New Glenn rocket until late 2027.
The failure of New Glenn also has major implications for NASA and its surging efforts to return humans to the Moon before the end of this decade, and to establish a lunar base on the surface.
On Tuesday NASA announced that it had selected the New Glenn rocket to deliver the first two rovers, built by Lunar Outpost and Astrolab, to the lunar surface in 2028. Blue Origin has developed its own cargo lunar lander, Blue Moon Mark 1, designed to fly on top of New Glenn. It was due to launch this fall to the Moon for the first time, and again next year carrying the VIPER rover to the Moon for NASA.
Yes, two days after NASA announced it had selected New Glenn to deliver its lunar rovers, a New Glenn rocket blew the company's launchpad to smithereens.
Because of the success of New Glenn, Blue Origin was set to "break into a monthly launch cadence." Not anymore.
The company may pivot now, abandoning the smaller version of the rocket that exploded on the launch pad in favor of its larger one.
One thing is for sure: If this had been a SpaceX rocket that exploded, the media would have been mocking the company and its owner, Elon Musk, for days!
The unfortunate incident got a nod of sympathy from the Mars Man himself:
The final frontier is a risky business!
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They don’t call them “blast zones” without a reason. Seen a couple of them pop.
NASA and the Russians blew up a lot of rockets and even killed some folks before they started having real success in not blowing up rockets and killing people. Space travel is VERY dangerous, people will die, rockets will blow up.
Goddard had numerous problems….
It's almost as if though they're not supposed to mess with the mass of the moon which would change its orbit.
My mother-in-law used to live there and everybody from there knows what is what. But I bet some tourists were scared.............
Absolutely. The locals, I am sure, ALL knew. Heh, if you were just driving through and saw that...
LOL. The Moon's mass is roughly 73.4 sextillion metric tons.
Let's say you built a moon base that weighed 1,000 metric tons. It would add 0.000000000000015% to the Moon's mass. That's not even measurable.
If you launched all the material mined on Earth in an entire year (about 100 billion tons) and piled it onto the Moon, it would still only change the Moon's mass by a negligible 0.00000014%.
And even if the amount of mass added was significant, the mass of a satellite (whether it's the Moon or a feather) does not affect its orbital path. The movement of mass from Earth to Moon might shift the Barycenter (which is deep inside the Earth) perhaps the width of an atom or less. Basically unmeasurable and certainly negligible.
Don't lose any sleep over the Moon's orbit. It's known natural orbital change (it drifts away from Earth a couple inches per year) far exceeds anything we humans can do to it.
And with manned space travel the farther you attempt to go the danger gets exponentially greater. The difference between going to the moon and going to mars is not just one of degree but of kind. Going to Mars presents dozens of incredibly difficult and complex issues the moon trip didn’t have to deal with. Despite Elon’s ambitions, right now we don’t have anything close to the reliable technology or space infrastructure necessary to take a man to mars…much less get him back, which is an even more difficult proposition.
Every failure in aerospace is a successful test. Expensive, but successful.
It blow’d up real good.
Explosion was heard 15 miles away.........
It’s people like you that make it hard to live with their phobias.
:)
I had to laugh at their first attempt with the Starship, that completely demolished their pad and left a 40 foot deep crater, even though everyone was saying "Don't you need more than just a pad?" and they confidently said "Nope."
Then they built another pad, with many more design elements in it, and that still wasn't good enough, it still got damaged.
Finally, they built what might be as close as anyone can get to a launch facility which is built as robustly as can be done, although I think if that thing blows up on the pad, it will be one of the largest human caused non-nuclear explosions in history!
But that is the thing I admire about SpaceX. They seem absolutely fearless in these things, and they DO learn from them...and extraordinarily quickly, too. Amazing.
> … take a man to mars…much less get him back, which is an even more difficult proposition.
Mars is a one-way trip, period. You become a human “Martian”.
That "negligible" initial change of 0.00000014% will still have an impact. The deviation of the moon's orbit will continually worsen.
What causes this?
If the BO's lunar lander test is to happen this year, likely will require the Falcon Heavy, which actually has more payload capacity than the NG anyway.
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