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This is a crushing setback for Blue Origin.

I feel for the engineers. They have been the underdogs for so long, but with the recent successful recovery of the New Glenn booster, it finally seemed like they had some bragging rights. Now they're looking at a year minimum before they get back to a regular launch rhythm.

The question now is: What went wrong? If they're lucky, it's just a stupid mistake. Maybe an incorrect procedure while loading fuel, or maybe a manufacturing error got past QC.

If they are unlucky, the cause will be a mystery, and it will take them months to nail down the root cause.

Early in Falcon 9's history, the Amos 6 satellite was stacked on the rocket during a routine static fire and the whole thing blew up. It happened so fast that there were only a few bits of telemetry between "everything normal" and "no signal". For a brief moment SpaceX suspected sabotage by rival ULA. They even requested access to a ULA building to see if a sniper could have taken a shot at the rocket.

It turned out to be an exotic failure: liquid oxygen had gotten caught inside a buckled liner in the carbon composite pressure vessels. Friction ignited it, and the entire second stage blew up, destroying the rocket.

I worked at SpaceX at the time, and I cannot speak for the company, but I can tell you that approximately nobody inside SpaceX took the idea of a sniper seriously. There was a lot of internet talk about it, and it was one of hundreds of avenues that were explored, and ruled out basically as soon as it was explored.

The very interesting part of the liquid oxygen failure (and this was published in the investigative findings) was that the liquid oxygen that became trapped in the fibers was actually cooled and compressed into solid oxygen - you can read some details here: https://www.americaspace.com/2017/01/02/spacex-closes-amos-6...

> They even requested access to a ULA building to see if a sniper could have taken a shot at the rocket.

> It turned out to be an exotic failure: liquid oxygen had gotten caught inside a buckled liner

I gotta say, suspecting "Rival company hired a sniper" before "Dealing with liquid oxygen is very fucking hard and incredibly flammable" feels very Elon

Crushing only because their cadence is so slow compared to SpaceX. Their process seems much closer to the highly risk averse methodology of traditional incumbents than to SpaceX's style. Failure becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Rockets are ridiculously complex. Slow-and-steady wins the race makes sense for many individual components, depending on how well understood the problem domain is, and your ability to rigorously model things. But if you take that approach when testing all the thousands of components together, which is simply just too complex to exhaustively model[1], you'll never get anywhere. You have to be prepared to not only break some eggs in epic fashion, but to break many as quickly as you can, so you can parallelize your problem solving and iterate faster.

[1] At least without a large multiple in time and monetary expenditure that ends up costing more than even the US (government and private capital combined) is prepared to spend.

I'm not sure if I would call the vanity project of one of the richest people on earth an "underdog".

Btw, "If they're lucky, it's just a stupid mistake" is actually interesting.

If you're at that stage and spending so much money, I would consider making stupid mistakes to be catastrophic.

"United Launch Alliance (ULA) is an American launch service provider formed in December 2006 as a joint venture between Lockheed Martin Space and Boeing Defense, Space & Security."

for those who wondered like me!

> Maybe an incorrect procedure while loading fuel, or maybe a manufacturing error got past QC.

The water was on when it exploded so it had to be an event very close to ignition. Before the big explosion there was a large intense fire at the bottom but the upper stage exploded before the fire had heated that part of the rocket. Will be interesting to read about what caused it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaR6yEE-Myo&t=128s

How does one even go about finding a root cause so exotic?
>It happened so fast that there were only a few bits of telemetry between "everything normal" and "no signal".

SpaceX also had an architecture that added a lot of latency to their telemetry transmission (IIRC basically Ethernet bufferbloat)

> This is a crushing setback for Blue Origin.

For SpaceX it would have been a success. /s

Ouch, losing the rocket is unfortunate, but the damage to the launch infrastructure is going to easily mean over a year of repairs. I hope they're going to take this as an opportunity to update the infrastructure from lessons learned from the flights so far, and to be able to support some of their future ambitions (e.g. Jarvis).
The video angle published by the BBC is better, it appears to show one side of the rocket disintegrating and sliding down non-explosively before the large explosion really kicked in. Would hate for this all to be described by a few missing bolts

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/videos/cvgz0pdg32mo

edit: the failure appears to start at the bottom, this seems to have damaged the structure enough to cause the sliding to start, then the huge fireball seems to begin with a small flash closer to the top of the rocket

I would guess this puts a big dent in NASA's moon plans. I think Blue origin was _just_ selected to be the first moon lander mission. Now they are going to be grounded _again_. They just got off grounded status last week! And this is not even going to mention the significant ground equipment damage they have to deal with.

Very unfortunate all around. I hope BO finds a way to keep the timelines.

I might have seen the explosion light up some clouds in Orlando. I was driving East when I saw a patch of clouds glow orange for a few seconds and then go dark. I wondered what that was... then found out this happened at the same time I was driving!
On the upside (or maybe that's tightly bolted down side), at least the rocket stayed static, unlike this one in China:

https://youtu.be/IlQkeKa4IKg?si=nu-0D73-7hNg6jW3

Reminds me words, attributed to one of first soviets astronauts: "You're sitting on top of 9 story building, completely filled with fuel and they say to you: don't worry, we calculated everything".

The exploded one was about 15-story building.

It is not clear what "full duration static fire" means, but if the stage was fully fueled, the fuel tank would have contained 1000 tons of methane. The heat of combustion of methane is 55 MJ/kg. TNT equivalent is defined as 4.2 MJ/kg. In terms of heat output (not blast or other effects) this would have been equivalent to 13 kilotons of TNT.

The first atomic bomb had yield of 20 kt TNT, of which about half was in heat, and the rest in the blast and radiation.

Depending on how full the rocket tank actually was, the fireball from the rocket explosion was in the same ballpark, or possibly even larger in the size and duration of afterglow compared to that from the Trinity nuclear test.

Have we confirmed nobody was hurt?

EDIT: Everyone is fine [1]. Go ahead and make jokes.

[1] https://x.com/blueorigin/status/2060172114796204539?s=20

Does anyone else find it surprising that rockets are a century old[1] and yet still seem to fail spectacularly with amazing regularity, often due to some small flaw? Is it just that they're still relatively niche machines and thus haven't benefited from mass manufacturing improvements?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Goddard_and_Rocket.jpg

SpaceX Starship also exploded during a static fire test on June 18, 2025.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/spacex-starship-upper-stage-exp...

Hypothetical scenario - if the entire New Glenn rocket exploded up to highest point in under 4 seconds and if there was a passenger capsule on top with a SLS/Saturn size escape rocket, would it manage to escape in those 2-3 seconds? Would humans survive acceleration?
NSF is also reporting that it took out one of the lightning rod towers. It'll be interesting to see how much damage the pad and ground equipment sustained.
Looks even crazier in this angle:

https://x.com/SawyerMerritt/status/2060174287563116696/video...

It looks to me like the initial explosion was at the upper part of the rocket. Reminded the Starship explosion https://x.com/NASASpaceflight/status/1935548909805601020 where on 0.25 speed also visible what the start of the catastrophe was at the upper part.

Interesting that just 2 days ago NASA picked Blue Origin instead of SpaceX for this year Moon flights.

On a sidenote, one can wonder how much, giving coming SpaceX IPO, it costs for Bezos to hire a Starship engineer :)

Also known as a Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly in engineer speak.
Tragic. But spaceflight isn't easy. Easy to have your expectations shifted as a watching fan after so many successful launches in recent times.
Very unfortunate, but strategically this changes nothing for US spaceflight. If anything, SpaceX will continue to increase its dominance.
There are massive machines filled with reactants under high pressure and cryogenic temperatures.

It is amazing that this doesn't happen more often.

Blowing up on the launch pad is like a rite of passage for every serious rocket program. The engineering margins are thin out of necessity, and lots of things conspire to eat through them.

Rocket science is hard, and rocket physics are unforgiving. If the planet was just a little bit heavier, we would not be able to leave it with chemical rockets at all.

This shows the importance of choosing the correct jargon and terminology, and then employing clear and unambiguous communication. They asked engineers for a static fire test. Got one hell of a fire, so that’s good, but it wasn’t very static…
The explosion was seen even by some in Orlando (mainly East Orlando) in such a way, that a coworker noted their son saw it while on the highway and thought the worst (a giant mushroom cloud is kind of horrifying) at first.
Is it normal to load ALL the propellant when doing a static fire? (I presume that's the case, anyway, given the sheer magnitude of the kaboom.)

I know a WDR typically would, but I don't think they perform an ignition for those.

Yikes. That's a big bang.
Thats a very impressive bang
Does anyone know what the fuel level was for the static test fire vs the upcoming mission profile? I want to know how big the explosion for new Glenn would be fully loaded.
And if anyone is curious what is N1?

> It is possibly the most dramatic and powerful rocket explosion since the Soviet Union’s N1 rocket was destroyed during a launch attempt in 1969.

NSF live https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jm8wRjD3xVA
Man they spent a huge amount on the launch infrastructure and it was ready long before the rocket. It was waiting for a long time. And now it reversed.
Let me quote a portion of lyrics from Still Alive:

> But there's no sense crying over every mistake

> You just keep on trying 'til you run out of cake

They sent me a rejection notice for my application on the same day. I'm sure that was the reason.
Blue Origin's tortoise slow-and-steady approach to development ia increasingly looking stupid.
There's got to be better way than burning a shittonne of fuel. Anyone else know?
It looks like the explosion starts from the second stage
Hooray! A static test fire caught a problem.

Crap! There was a serious latent problem for the test fire to find.

excessive fuel delivery failure probable IMO. The direction and source of explosion seemed localized at first.
Static fire more like dynamic fire
Omelets and eggs and all that.