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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Elon are you listening?
Carl Sagan is a fraud. His nuclear winter theory is junk and was spectacularly disproven by the first gulf war when he falsely predicted an environmental apocalypse (that never came) caused by oil fields burning. Bringing him to the same league as Feynman is out of touch.
And it was said those “Feynman videos” were AI generated. The AI part is the voiceover, but the content is from Feynman lectures, nothing of “dubious value”. On the contrary, it’s quite good pedagogy.
For returning from Mars, look up Buzz Aldrin’s and Prof. Kruglinski’s “Mars Cycler”.
Brief video shows explosion from beginning to end:
https://rumble.com/v7aj37o-another-view-of-massive-blue-origin-explosion.html
lets just say from the picture i have seen the pad area needs a complete rebuild. a rebuild will take a year at least
rockets are hard
Let’s say it costs X to send a SpaceX rocket and payload satelite 25,000 miles and 100x to send 2 men and a payload to the moon 235,855 miles.
So how much would it cost for a Boeing 747 (or pick your vehicle) to take that payload 25,000 miles from US to India to England and back to the US for 25,000 miles?
How much for a Boeing 747 to take 2 men and a lunar payload 235,855 miles around the earth hundreds of times?
Maybe they should look into building with some other materials like granite instead of concrete.................
interesting idea
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