Blue Origin rocket explodes during ground test

By Deblina Chakraborty, Ashley Strickland, CNN

(CNN) — A Blue Origin New Glenn rocket experienced an anomaly during a ground test known as a hotfire Thursday, the company shared on X.

Video captured from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida Thursday evening appears to show a rocket exploding on its launchpad.

“All personnel are accounted for and safe,” Jeff Bezos, Blue Origin’s founder, said in a separate X post. “It’s too early to know the root cause but we’re already working to find it. Very rough day, but we’ll rebuild whatever needs rebuilding and get back to flying. It’s worth it.”

The company announced New Glenn’s plans to return to flight earlier this week after a failure during the rocket’s third flight on April 19 prompted a Federal Aviation Administration investigation. During the April mission, the rocket’s first stage booster landed successfully on a seafaring barge, but the upper portion, or second stage, of the rocket didn’t manage to deliver its payload — AST SpaceMobile’s BlueBird 7 satellite — to a safe orbit.

New Glenn’s fourth mission was intended to carry 48 satellites to join Amazon Leo’s broadband constellation.

“The FAA is aware that the Blue Origin New Glenn vehicle experienced an anomaly during a static fire test on the pad in Cape Canaveral, Florida around 9 p.m. local time on May 28,” the agency said in a statement to CNN. “This test was not within the scope of FAA licensed activities. There was no impact to air traffic. Please contact Blue Origin for more information.”

Blue Origin did not immediately respond to a request for further comment.

“NASA is aware of the anomaly that occurred tonight at Launch Complex 36 involving Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station,” NASA chief Jared Isaacman said on X Thursday. “Spaceflight is unforgiving, and developing new heavy-lift launch capability is extraordinarily difficult. We will work with our partners to support a thorough investigation of this anomaly, assess near-term mission impacts, and get back to launching rockets.”

Range officials are coordinating with Blue Origin and its partners to determine the exact cause of the anomaly, according to a statement released by the US Space Force.

“The Eastern Range serves as a Department of Defense test and training range supporting critical development, testing, evaluation, and launch activities that advance national security and space capabilities,” according to the statement. “These operations often involve developmental systems and emerging technologies, and the nature of such testing carries inherent risk, including the potential for anomalies.”

Blue Origin warned in a social media statement Friday that debris from the incident “may wash ashore in the coming days.”

“If you encounter any debris, do not touch or approach it for your safety,” the company said in the post.

New Glenn’s highs and lows

The debut flight of New Glenn — Blue Origin’s first orbital rocket — on January 16, 2025, was deemed a success. But the company did not reach its bonus goal of guiding the vehicle’s first-stage booster back to a safe landing on a seafaring platform after takeoff. The company later attributed the failed recovery attempt to engines that did not properly reignite.

That landing maneuver, designed to allow Blue Origin to refurbish and reuse rocket boosters — much like SpaceX does with its Falcon rockets — is intended to save money and drive down the cost of launches. If New Glenn finds consistent success with reusability in this way, it could potentially chip away at SpaceX’s dominance in the industry.

Blue Origin spent 10 months tweaking the vehicle to guarantee a successful booster landing, and New Glenn’s second launch in November 2025 seemingly went off without a hitch. The booster landed safely, and the flight also sent an important payload, a landmark NASA mission called Escapade, off on its winding journey to Mars.

The company celebrated its booster landing after New Glenn’s third flight in April but Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp acknowledged in a post on X that losing AST SpaceMobile’s satellite was less than ideal.

“While we are pleased with the nominal booster recovery, we clearly didn’t deliver the mission our customer wanted, and our team expects,” Limp posted at the time. “Early data suggest that on our second GS2 burn, one of the BE-3U engines didn’t produce sufficient thrust to reach our target orbit.”

Blue Origin’s lunar ambitions

Blue Origin announced in January it was pausing flights of its space tourism rocket, known as New Shepard, for two years to focus on developing human lunar landers. New Shepard had been launching 10-minute flights carrying celebrities, special guests and wealthy thrill seekers to the edge of space since 2021.

Both Bezos’s company and SpaceX hold NASA contracts to develop vehicles capable of ferrying astronauts from space to the moon’s surface for the Artemis program. SpaceX plans to use its Starship megarocket — a gargantuan rocket system that CEO Elon Musk originally billed for Mars travel — for the task, and expected to take on the earliest human landing attempts in NASA’s plans. However, Starship is still in the early stages of development, and over the past couple of years prototypes have exploded during brief, suborbital test flights.

Meanwhile, Blue Origin is building a lunar lander that looks more like a traditional Apollo-style vehicle. But the company has not yet launched a test flight. A smaller, uncrewed version of the lander had been expected to launch to the moon on a New Glenn rocket at soon as this year.

Transportation secretary Sean Duffy issued warnings to the dueling companies in October, when he was also serving as NASA’s acting administrator: He indicated that NASA may use Blue Origin’s lander to return humans to the moon as soon as 2028 if SpaceX’s lander is too far behind schedule.

“If SpaceX is behind, but Blue Origin can do it before them, good on Blue Origin,” Duffy told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” in October. “But … we’re not going to wait for one company. We’re going to push this forward and win the second space race against the Chinese.”

Given that oversight officials were skeptical that either lander could be ready for a lunar touchdown in 2028, it also remains to be seen whether either vehicle could be ready to complete a crewed test mission in low-Earth orbit by next year as NASA’s administrator, Isaacman, hopes.

It is unclear how Thursday night’s anomaly will impact Blue Origin’s lunar ambitions going forward.

“We will provide information on any impacts to the Artemis and Moon Base programs as it becomes available,” Isaacman said in his post on X Thursday evening.

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