The recent explosion of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket during a routine test is a big setback for the private spaceflight company, and will likely have implications for NASA’s Artemis program timeline and the nation’s efforts to return astronauts to the surface of the moon.
The May 28 incident, in which no one was injured, occurred while Blue Origin prepared its fourth New Glenn rocket for launch. A static test fire of the vehicle’s engines at Launch Complex-36 (LC-36), located at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station (CCSFS) in Florida, was the rocket’s last major milestone before a liftoff targeted for June 4. During that test, however, an explosion destroyed the rocket and severely damaged launch infrastructure on the ground. (The payload for that flight, a group of 48 Amazon Leo internet satellites, was not aboard the rocket when it exploded.)
The mishap is a major blow to Blue Origin’s progress with New Glenn, which was only cleared to proceed with the upcoming flight a week ago. New Glenn had been grounded pending a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) investigation after the NG-3 mission in April, when a failure of the rocket’s second stage stranded AST SpaceMobile’s BlueBird 7 satellite payload in an unstable orbit. Now, with another investigation opening, and extensive repairs needed at LC-36, New Glenn may be grounded for a while, potentially forcing NASA to change its expectations for how Blue Origin will support upcoming Artemis missions.
“This is a pretty significant incident to happen to Blue Origin,” Kathleen Curlee, a commercial space industry research analyst at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, told Space.com in an interview.
New Glenn is Blue Origin’s partially reusable heavy-lift launch vehicle, designed to compete with SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Starship rockets. Before New Glenn, New Shepard was the only rocket Blue Origin ever launched to space, and each of those flights was suborbital. Though long delayed in its initial debut, New Glenn made it to orbit on its first launch in January 2025 and performed a successful landing of the rocket’s first stage during its second mission (NG-2). And, despite the second stage shortfalls of NG-3, that mission managed to reuse NG-2’s landed booster core (with new engines), which performed a second successful landing on Blue Origin’s recovery droneship “Jacklyn,” in the Atlantic Ocean.
All that progress now comes to a screeching halt while Blue Origin investigates the cause of New Glenn’s explosion and faces the task of rebuilding LC-36. In the meantime, the 2027 target to launch the next mission in NASA’s Artemis program, Artemis 3, inches ever closer, and the time for Blue Origin to RSVP to the party draws nearer.
The Artemis program aims to create a sustained human presence with a base on the moon, and eventually develop technologies that can support crewed missions to Mars. The agency selected Blue Origin and SpaceX to support that effort, contracting each company to design and build lunar landers capable of delivering astronauts to the moon’s surface and launching them back to lunar orbit to rendezvous with NASA’s Orion spacecraft.
The first of those lunar landing missions is Artemis 4, which NASA hopes to launch in late 2028. Artemis 3 is a stepping stone to that achievement, but one which relies on at least one lunar lander making it to space. And right now, Blue Origin’s contribution, the Blue Moon lander, has no way of getting there.
Blue Moon is designed to launch on New Glenn. The first prototype for that lander, the Blue Moon Mark 1 (MK1), was scheduled to launch in fall 2026 to deliver the first building blocks for NASA’s Moon Base 1 mission phase. With a delay of that mission now likely, the development and qualification timeline for the crew-capable Blue Moon MK2 may now slip as well.
“It’s a good lander, it’s a good system, but they cannot get it to the moon without their New Glenn, and their New Glenn is grounded,” Curlee said.
The goal of Artemis 3 is to launch Orion with a crew of astronauts into Earth orbit to rendezvous and dock with one or both of the program’s lunar landers. Before a program architecture redesign earlier this year, NASA chose Starship to fly the first Artemis lunar landing mission. But development of SpaceX’s megarocket spacecraft faced its own delays, and NASA has since indicated a willingness to fly with whichever lunar lander can be ready when the time comes to launch the missions ahead. The loss of New Glenn and the damage to the rocket’s only launch pad now give SpaceX a potential leg up in that competition.
Starship has faced its own delays over the past several years — even explosions in flight and on the test stand. The spacecraft’s 12th overall test flight launched on May 22, for instance, and experienced issues with the vehicle’s new Raptor 3 engines that led to a failure in the first stage’s boostback burn, and its subsequent fiery plunge into the Gulf of Mexico. But that incident, during an otherwise successful flight, doesn’t quite stack up against New Glenn’s explosive mishap, Curlee said.
“In the launch industry, it is a success if you get your rocket off of the launch pad,” she said. “Yes, [SpaceX] had anomalies … but they did not blow up their launch pad, and they were able to achieve flight. For Blue Origin, this exploding on the launch pad is a pretty significant failure.”
SpaceX is no stranger to destroying launch pads, however. In September 2016, the company experienced an accident similar to New Glenn’s explosion: A Falcon 9 rocket exploded at CCSFS’s Launch Complex-40 (LC-40) during the static fire test for the Amos-6 communications satellite launch. (The satellite was aboard the rocket at the time and was destroyed.) According to Curlee, though, that loss wasn’t as hard a blow to SpaceX as this fresh one will be to Blue Origin.
Following an incident investigation at the time, SpaceX was able to return Falcon 9 to flight about four months later, but only because of the company’s additional launch pads at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, which is next door to CCSFS, and Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Launches didn’t return to LC-40 until December 2017.
Blue Origin has no other launch pads for New Glenn, so regardless of the length of the company’s investigation into the cause of the explosion, New Glenn is grounded until LC-36 can get back up and running.
“Launch pads are a pretty high-value real estate item,” Curlee said. “There’s only a few launch pads that can handle the size of the New Glenn, and the one that [Blue Origin] had was LC-36, which has now been destroyed. So this is a pretty significant setback.”
Still, she doesn’t think it heralds the end of NASA’s lunar ambitions. “I think overall this doesn’t mean that we’ve lost the moon … but NASA is going to have significantly readjust its Artemis and Moon Base programs to account for the fact that this happened.”