Blue Origin’s Recent Glenn mega-rocket just exploded during testing at a launch site in Cape Canaveral, Florida, according to live streams from NASASpaceFlight.com and SpaceFlight Now. Blue Origin later confirmed the explosion.
Jeff Bezos’ space company was performing a static fire test ahead of an anticipated fourth launch of the brand new rocket in the approaching weeks, which was imagined to carry Amazon Leo web satellites to space. Which means the rocket was likely fully fueled, contributing to what’s one in every of the most important rocket explosions in U.S. history and the worst failure in Blue Origin’s existence.
Blue Origin said in an X post Thursday evening that “[a]ll personnel have been accounted for,” and Bezos wrote that they were “protected.” The corporate didn’t say what went flawed, only that an “anomaly” occurred.
“It’s too early to know the basis cause but we’re already working to seek out it. Very rough day, but we’ll rebuild whatever needs rebuilding and get back to flying. It’s value it,” Bezos wrote.
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said in a post late Thursday that the agency will “work with our partners to support a radical investigation of this anomaly, assess near-term mission impacts, and get back to launching rockets.”
In a press release, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) told TechCrunch it was aware of the explosion and said there was “no impact to air traffic.” NASA and the Space Force didn’t immediately reply to requests for comment.
The explosion likely means Blue Origin may have to pause the Recent Glenn rocket program for an prolonged time period while it really works through what went flawed. Blue Origin had been planning to aim as many as 12 launches of Recent Glenn this 12 months, after the corporate spent around a decade developing it in an try to compete with Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
The corporate can be imagined to help power NASA’s Artemis missions to the moon, with the agency highlighting Blue Origin’s expected role in that program earlier this week. Isaacman said Thursday that NASA will “provide any impacts to the Artemis and Moon Base programs because it becomes available.”
Blue Origin has been aiming to launch national security missions for the Pentagon as well.
“Most unlucky. Rockets are hard,” Elon Musk wrote on X shortly after the explosion. “I hope you recuperate quickly.”
The explosion comes just a number of weeks after Blue Origin’s Recent Glenn rocket flew for the third time ever. That mission suffered its own failure when the Recent Glenn upper stage did not put an AST SpaceMobile satellite into orbit, causing a complete lack of the mission. Just last week, the FAA cleared Recent Glenn to fly again after Blue Origin accomplished an investigation into the explanation for the failure.
A really recent, late rocket
Blue Origin has spent years developing Recent Glenn while it used its Recent Shepard program to check out smaller-scale sub-orbital rockets. While Recent Shepard has ferried a reasonably regular cadence of rich people and celebrities (together with some science missions) to the sting of space, Blue Origin was continuously working within the background to develop a rocket that might put real industrial payloads like large satellites into orbit.
That work took a protracted time — longer than Blue Origin had anticipated — but finally got here to a head in January 2025, when the corporate flew Recent Glenn for the primary time.
Recent Glenn seemed to be a reasonably successful rocket right off the bat. It reached orbit during that first flight, though the booster stage exploded before Blue Origin could try to land it on a drone ship within the ocean.
Blue Origin was much more successful with Recent Glenn’s second flight, though, in November 2025. During that mission the corporate launched twin spacecraft to Mars for NASA. Blue Origin also landed its first booster stage during Recent Glenn’s second mission.
That allowed the corporate to re-fly the booster on Recent Glenn’s third mission, showing not only the flexibility to recuperate the primary stage, but refurbish it for re-use — a critical step in reducing the general cost of operating a launch business.
The re-used rocket booster had no problems flying again, and even landed a second time on one in every of Blue Origin’s drone ships, during Recent Glenn’s third mission in April 2026. But the corporate experienced a cryogenic failure within the upper stage during mission three, which led to the lack of the satellite.
This upcoming fourth mission was imagined to be the primary of 24 launches that Amazon has contracted Blue Origin for. Amazon is currently constructing out a competitor to SpaceX’s Starlink satellite web network, which it calls Leo. On Wednesday, Amazon touted its ability to depend on Blue Origin to construct the network, calling Recent Glenn a “reusable, heavy-lift rocket.”
Amazon confirmed to TechCrunch late Thursday that no Leo satellites were on board for this test.
Late Thursday, Congressman Mike Haridopolos (R-FL), who represents the district that’s home to Cape Canaveral, wrote on X that he had spoken with NASA administrator Jared Isaacman concerning the explosion.
“I’m grateful there have been no reported injuries and thankful for the primary responders, engineers, and launch crews who acted quickly. Praying for Florida’s Space Coast and everybody involved,” he said.
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