Big boom.
Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket didn’t just fail on Thursday night. It vanished. Disappeared in a wall of fire so bright it likely woke up half of Florida.
No one died. That is the only saving grace. But let’s be real. It is a very expensive mistake.
The static fire gone wrong
The rocket was sitting on the pad at Cape Canaveral. It was a static hot-fire test. That sounds benign. It isn’t really.
You strap the vehicle down. You fuel it up. Then you fire every single engine to see if the structure can hold. The rocket stays on the ground. It should.
Around 9 p.m. Eastern time, the physics stopped cooperating.
Blue Origin called it an “anomaly.” That is corporate speak. SpaceX calls the same thing “rapid unscheduled disassembly.” The result is identical. The ship broke. The fire was huge. Spaceflight Now caught it on camera.
Bezos is not happy
One of these rockets costs over $100 million.
Think about that for a second. $100,000,000. Poof. Gone in a static test.
Jeff Bezos posted from his personal account shortly after. He confirmed the safety of his crew. Then he got down to business.
“It’s worth it,” he wrote.
He admits they are digging into the cause right now. He knows they have to rebuild whatever they can.
SpaceX saw something similar last June. Starship exploded during a similar test. So this is not a new problem for heavy lifters. It’s just a painful one.
“Very rough day, but we’re already working to find the root cause,” Bezos said. “We’ll get back to flying.”
They will fly again. They always do. But tonight the sky over Florida was very orange. And the budget just got much heavier.
What is the root cause? No one knows yet. They are looking.
