Zitat Peter H. Diamandis, MD@PeterDiamandis Starship was the greatest thing humanity ever built without AI assistance. It will be the last. Everything after this will be designed with AI. The era of human-only engineering is over. 3:02 PM · May 23, 2026
Zitat ApoStructura@ApoStructura the most impressive part of flight 12 apart from the heat shield’s performance is how despite losing 1 rvac the ship managed to land exactly on target incredibly robustness and a good sign for the future 3:03 PM · May 23, 2026
algernon79@algern0n79 The engine shut down 36 seconds into a 347-second planned burn. Ship had to burn so long to compensate it got to the coast phase ~70 seconds later than planned, but still made a pinpoint landing later on. Brilliant engine-out capability demo. 3:23 PM · May 23, 2026
Daß die Brennphase des Schiffs erheblich länger dauerte als im Flugplan vorgesehen, war auch schon aus dem Kommentar im Livestream beim Start zu hören (mitsamt der Spekulation, da sei wohl eine stabile Kreisbahn erreicht worden).
"Les hommes seront toujours fous; et ceux qui croient les guérir sont les plus fous de la bande." - Voltaire
Zitat Emerald Apple@AI_EmeraldApple The main failure of flight test 12 is actually a sign of how insanely powerful the Raptor 3 engine is.
During "most engine cutoff," that extra power from the booster and the upperstage engines during the hotstage separation pushed the booster to flip sideways at 44 degrees per second, or 0.77 rads/s. Nominally, it should flip up instead of sideways more slowly.
That rotation was WAY too fast in the wrong direction with added axial rotation, causing an estimated 2.2 g outward force at the nose of the booster, causing massive sloshing for the propellant. That caused gas ingestion, engine explosion, and cascading failure for the boostback. This led the booster to an uncontrolled fall at terminal velocity.
I think for the next flight, they are going to have to change the gimbal profile for the MECO to reduce rotation and counteract the upperstage engine push, increase the coast time to allow propellant to settle, and stagger the relight more slowly with 2 engines per 3-4 seconds or so.
This won't need many hardware changes, mostly software changes, so the next launch will probably be sooner than expected... classic too much of a good thing problem. 6:02 PM · May 23, 2026
Zitat von Ulrich Elkmann im Beitrag #101Starship was the greatest thing humanity ever built without AI assistance. It will be the last. Everything after this will be designed with AI. The era of human-only engineering is over.
Ich hatte neulich einen Video-Link geschickt bekommen, in dem darüber berichtet wird, wie ein Unternehmen namens LEAP71 zwei Raketentriebwerke von "KI" entwickeln ließ. Unglaublich: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gpLoudrp_g&t=6s Bezeichnend dabei ist auch, dass die beiden Gründer offensichtlich Deutsche sind, ihr Unternehmen wohl aber in Dubai ansässig ist.
Gruß Morn <>< ______________________________________ Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it. Thomas Sowell
Zitat Aaron Burnett@aaronburnett Raptor 3s without shielding is a very very important design decision for the overall payload mass fraction. The near perfect ascent stage with Raptor 3 was a very big win. Points to minimal issues to getting orbital with payloads.
Boost back issue may have been Raptor specific and may have been exasperated by the failure contagion that cascaded to other raptors we’ll see. This is part of the iteration process to watch. Booster reuse is important for dropping from ~$1k/kg to $300/kg prior to starship reuse driving to $100/kg. Both of these require relights and burns for slowing down.
Importantly Starship raptors appeared to handle their fairly exotic maneuvers well.
Zitat TheSpaceEngineer@mcrs987·18h I think we got to see the consequences of the lack of full blast shielding. Boostback probably would have gone fine minus one engine had this single engine, either E5 or E6, not had an energetic event and took out 16 of its neighboring engines.
Zitat Elon Musk@elonmusk Our goal is launching Starship >10k/year, which would be more than once an hour. Probably over 200 tons of useful load to a useful orbit per flight by then. 3:38 AM · May 24, 2026
Zitat Muskonomy@muskonomy JUST IN: Elon Musk reveals SpaceX's long-term Starship launch goal after Flight 12.
"Our goal is launching Starship >10k/year, which would be more than once an hour. Probably over 200 tons of useful load to a useful orbit per flight by then."
At 10,000 launches and 200 metric tons per flight, that is 2 billion metric tons to orbit per year. SpaceX delivered 2,213 metric tons in all of 2025. 4:21 AM · May 24, 2026
Zitat Jeff Bezos@JeffBezos All personnel are accounted for and safe. 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. 4:13 AM · May 29, 2026
Zitat Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket explodes during prelaunch testing at Cape Canaveral
May 29, 2026
The rocket erupted in a giant fire ball that engulfed the launch pad at 9 p.m. EDT (0100 UTC) as the engines appeared to be igniting for a pre-launch test known as a static fire. New Glenn had been slated to launch a batch of satellites for another Bezos venture, Amazon Leo, as soon as Thursday, June 4.
The Amazon Leo satellites had not been transported to the launch site from its payload processing facility to be integrated with the rocket. This was set to be the first of 24 launches that Amazon Leo booked on New Glenn rockets.
Blue Origin had just received clearance from the Federal Aviation Administration to resume launches of its New Glenn rocket on Friday, May 22. During the New Glenn 3 (NG-3) mission, the rocket suffered an in-flight anomaly with its upper stage that prevented it from placing AST SpaceMobile’s BlueBird-7 satellite into the correct orbit.
The anomaly Thursday night appeared to destroy at least one of the lightning protection towers at LC-36 and the transporter erector. Until a full assessment is completed, it’s impossible to know exactly how long it will take to resume launch operations at pad.
If the issue is connected back to the main propulsion system and the rocket’s methane-fueled BE-4 engines, that might have a direct impact on United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rockets. That launch vehicle was grounded due to a solid rocket booster anomaly, but both vehicles use the BE-4 engine for their first stages.
“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. 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,” Isaacman wrote in a statement on social media. “We will provide information on any impacts to the Artemis and Moon Base programs as it becomes available.”
Zitat Eric Berger@SciGuySpace This completely takes Blue Origin out of the Artemis picture for the next 12 months, most likely. All of those Moon Base missions, man, it's bad. 3:17 AM · May 29, 2026
Zitat The company's powerful New Glenn rocket exploded during a routine prelaunch engine test at Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Thursday night (May 28), creating a huge fireball that lit up the dark Space Coast skies.
Nobody was injured, Blue Origin said in an update on X on Thursday night. But damage to the pad — Launch Complex 36 (LC-36) — could be extensive, judging by the extent of the explosion, which multiple rocket-watchers captured on video.
The accident could have big implications for Blue Origin, NASA and the United States' moon plans.
And the agency announced earlier this week that Blue Moon will land two private lunar rovers on the lunar surface — missions that are key to the buildout of NASA's planned moon base near the south pole. The agency wants at least one of those rovers to be on the moon before the first crewed Artemis mission (Artemis 4) touches down, a milestone targeted for late 2028.
But Blue Moon is supposed to head to the moon considerably sooner than that. Blue Origin is gearing up to send a robotic prototype of the vehicle, called Blue Moon Mark 1, to the lunar surface later this year, to demonstrate the vehicle’s capabilities.
Thursday's explosion occurred during a "hotfire" engine test meant to clear the path for New Glenn's fourth flight, which was supposed to deploy 49 satellites for Amazon's nascent broadband constellation. That mission was scheduled to fly on June 4.
LC-36 is currently the only pad that hosts New Glenn launches, so extensive damage to the pad would likely keep the rocket grounded for a while.
Zitat On Thursday evening Blue Origin attempted to test fire its massive New Glenn rocket at its Florida launch site, but something went very wrong after engine ignition. The super heavy lift rocket exploded in spectacular and disastrous fashion.
The static fire test was being filmed by NASASpaceflight.com on its Space Coast Live feed, which captured video of the conflagration that followed destruction of the booster. The first stage of New Glenn, fueled with methane, produced a massive fireball above the launch site along the Florida coast, LC-36A. 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.
There was no immediate indication as to what caused the rocket to fail during the initial stages of the static fire test. The failure originated with the first stage of the rocket, which is powered by seven BE-4 engines. Sources said the problem appeared to start in the engine section of the vehicle.
The failure of New Glenn also has major implications for NASA and its surging efforts to return humans to the Moon before the end of this decade, and to establish a lunar base on the surface.
On Tuesday NASA announced that it had selected the New Glenn rocket to deliver the first two rovers, built by Lunar Outpost and Astrolab, to the lunar surface in 2028. Blue Origin has developed its own cargo lunar lander, Blue Moon Mark 1, designed to fly on top of New Glenn. It was due to launch this fall to the Moon for the first time, and again next year carrying the VIPER rover to the Moon for NASA.
Then there is the larger Blue Moon Mark 2 lander, which is due to fly on a larger and more powerful version of the New Glenn rocket with nine first stage engines, known as 9×4. NASA is counting on the Mark 2 lander, alongside SpaceX’s Starship vehicle, to carry humans to the Moon on a regular basis — and soon.
It is too early to determine the impacts from this failure, but they will be considerable. Early reports from sources suggest that the launch infrastructure at LC-36A is severely damaged. A source indicated that one of the lightning towers may not be salvageable, and that the transporter-erector may also be damaged beyond repair.
Hier in Zeitlupe. Man sieht, daß es kurz vorher zu einem massiven Treibstoffausbruch direkt über der Triebwekssektion gekommen ist, gefolgt von den Explosion den unteren Teils der Startstufe.
Zitat Wall Street Mav@WallStreetMav Two days ago NASA just awarded Blue Origin (Jeff Bezos' rocket company) a contract for 3 unmanned moon missions.
The Blue Origin rocket just exploded on the launch pad. This will delay Blue Origin while they figure out and fix what went wrong.
Military launches will also be put on hold. The US military requires 3 successful certification launches before they will trust Blue Origin with military satellite contracts.
This will likely result in more military, NASA and commercial satellites being assigned to SpaceX in the coming years. 4:36 AM · May 29, 2026
Zitat 🇺🇸 Thomas A. Whitaker@WhitakerTA_·4h Nobody is telling you how FUCKED Blue Origin's entire rocket program just became.
Everyone is watching the fireball. The explosion. The shockwave.
Nobody is talking about the fact that Blue Origin just destroyed the ONLY pad it has.
New Glenn. A 320-foot rocket. Exploded on the launchpad at Cape Canaveral during a static fire test on May 28, 2026. Not a launch. Not a flight. A ground test. The rocket never left the ground and it still turned into what witnesses described as a nuclear bomb going off.
Elon Musk's response: "Most unfortunate. Rockets are hard."
→ Blue Origin confirmed an "anomaly" — no injuries, all personnel safe → The explosion was captured from multiple angles including a nearby SpaceX construction site → LC-36 is Blue Origin's ONLY operational New Glenn launch pad
And here's what nobody is explaining to you:
💀 This is not just a setback. This is an existential infrastructure problem.
This doesn't just delay THIS mission. This delays ALL missions. Indefinitely.
→ New Glenn had ONE successful orbital flight — January 2025 — before things started going wrong → April 2026: upper-stage engine failure lost an AST SpaceMobile commercial satellite in the wrong orbit → May 2026: the pad itself is now destroyed in a fireball during a ground test → There is no backup pad. There is no Plan B. There is no "we'll use the other one."
→ Project Kuiper — Amazon's answer to Starlink — depends on New Glenn to launch its satellites → Every week of delay is a week SpaceX Starlink widens its lead on global satellite internet → The pad damage requires repairs with no confirmed return-to-flight timeline → Blue Origin has now had two major failures in under six weeks
SpaceX has had static-fire explosions too. The difference is SpaceX built multiple pads, multiple rockets, and a launch cadence that absorbs failures.
Blue Origin built one pad. One rocket. And it just burned.
This isn't just a bad night for Jeff Bezos. It's the moment the gap between Blue Origin and SpaceX stopped being a rivalry and started being a rout.
Bookmark this. You're watching the biggest shift in the commercial space race since Falcon 9 first flew.
I'll keep you updated. Turn on notifications. 🚨 7:58 AM · May 29, 2026
Zitat Eric Berger@SciGuySpace The implications of New Glenn’s failure are probably worse than you think. I dig in here to some of the most serious concerns. 2:53 PM · May 29, 2026
Zitat Here’s why the failure of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket is so catastrophic
Metaphorically, the effort to pick up pieces will extend far beyond Blue Origin. This launch failure is going to be devastating for not just Blue Origin, but NASA and broad segments of the US space industry. Here’s a look at some of the major issues that will stem from the explosion.
No launch pad
There’s a reason why, before the very first launch of the Falcon Heavy rocket in 2018, SpaceX founder Elon Musk defined success as the vehicle clearing the launch pad. “I hope that it makes it far enough away from the pad that it does not cause pad damage,” he said. “I would consider even that a win to be honest.” Musk had similar thoughts about the first Starship launch, saying he would consider anything that did not destroy the launch mount a “win.”
Big rockets produce big explosions. And ground infrastructure is a challenging and underrated component of a rocket launch.
Multiple sources have confirmed that there is major damage to Blue Origin’s launch site in Florida, LC-36A. The company invested years, and at least hundreds of millions of dollars, in this facility. The scale of the massive lightning towers is difficult to comprehend unless one has climbed one of them.
The company does not have another launch site for New Glenn. It has begun preliminary work on a nearby pad, LC-36B, and has plans to develop another site at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. But these projects are only starting out.
Rebuilding the company’s pad, or finishing a new one, is likely to take at least a year, even with a major effort by Blue Origin, and drawing upon Jeff Bezos’ nearly infinite resources. One source familiar with pad rebuilds estimated that 15 months was a “best case” scenario. ... The reality is that Blue Origin took a more traditional design route with New Glenn, as opposed to SpaceX’s iterative design, which seeks to test, fly, fail, and fix hardware. The New Glenn first stage had performed nearly flawlessly during its first three flights. It is a mature design.
Because of this Blue Origin had reached the point where it was poised to begin near-monthly launches of the vehicle during the second half of the year, serving a variety of customers from NASA, to Amazon, AST SpaceMobile, and its own internal payloads.
With the Vulcan rocket also currently offline due to an anomaly, it once again places all of the US medium- and heavy-lift launch capacity entirely in the basket of SpaceX, with its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets.
Speaking of Vulcan, if this is a problem with the BE-4 engine—and early indications are that the anomaly leading to Thursday night’s failure originated in the central engine of the booster—it would further compound United Launch Alliance’s difficulties in getting the large rocket back into service.
Due to the Mark 1 issues outlined above, there will either be significant delays to, or the need to restructure the early phases of, the Moon Base program. The lunar rovers under development by Astrolab and Lunar Outpost, for example, have a mass of about 1 ton. Only Mark 1 and SpaceX’s Starship have that kind of delivery capacity.
There are also major implications for the main Artemis crewed missions.
NASA recently changed Artemis III to become a mission that will see the Orion spacecraft rendezvous with one or both of the Human Landing Systems under development by Blue Origin (Blue Moon) and SpaceX (Starship) in low-Earth orbit. NASA appears determined to launch this mission in 2027 and plans to announce its four crew members in a couple of weeks.
However it is now all but certain that a Blue Moon lander will not be ready for such a mission within the next 18 months. NASA will need to decide whether to wait on Blue Origin or press ahead solely with a Starship mission.
As for Artemis IV, the lunar landing, this failure further complicates that plan. It is difficult to conceive of a scenario in which a crew-rated Blue Moon lander is ready at any point in 2028 now. Even if the hardware is far along, Blue Origin still needs to fly test missions with Blue Moon Mark 1, which are on hold indefinitely.
Zitat It was less than two months ago that the third flight of Blue Origin’s heavy-lift New Glenn rocket left a customer’s payload in an unusable orbit. Investigators have now identified the cause of the failure, and Blue Origin is preparing to launch the next New Glenn mission as soon as next week.
It would be timely. Another heavy orbital-class rocket developed at the same time as New Glenn, ULA’s Vulcan, has struggled to sustain even a meager launch cadence since debuting in 2024. Two of the four Vulcan launches to date have suffered anomalies with solid rocket boosters, and although the missions succeeded in placing their payloads into orbit, the launcher is grounded as ULA and its subcontractors probe the recurring problem.
Bleibt festzuhalten: die New Glenn ist vorerst aus dem Spiel, die Vulcan ebenso, bis die Probleme mit den durchbrennenden Feststoffboostern behoben sind. Und die FAA hat die Probeflüge mit dem Starship vorerst bis zur Fehleranalyse nach dem Versagen beim "Boostback" bei Flug 12 gestoppt. Das ist in solchen Fällen Routine, aber hier steht vor den nächsten Teststarts erst einmal Neudesign und Umbau an. Wie es zurzeit aussieht, haben die Vibrationen der stärksten je geflogenen Startstufe zu einem Bruch in der Treibstoffzuleitung von Brennkammer 15 oder 16 geführt, und die fehlenden Trennwände haben bei der Explosion des Antriebs zum Ausfall von 16 weiteren geführt, knapp eine Selunde nach der Zündung nicht mehr auf den Telemetriedaten zu sehen sind.
"Les hommes seront toujours fous; et ceux qui croient les guérir sont les plus fous de la bande." - Voltaire
Zitat Aakash Gupta@aakashgupta Blue Origin just vaporized a rocket, a launch pad, and Amazon's entire satellite deployment timeline in nine seconds.
NG-4 was supposed to fly June 4 carrying 48 Amazon Leo satellites. That mission was the first of 24 contracted Blue Origin launches Amazon needs to build its Starlink competitor. Amazon has roughly 240 satellites in orbit against an FCC requirement of 1,618 by July 2026. They already filed for a two-year extension because they were falling short. Losing your primary heavy-lift rocket on the pad doesn't help that math.
The pad damage is the part people aren't thinking about. New Glenn carries roughly 2.4 million pounds of propellant. The explosion toppled one of LC-36's lightning protection towers. That launch complex took years to build and billions to outfit. You can manufacture a new rocket in months. You cannot rebuild a launch pad in months.
The cascade gets worse. Blue Origin's Blue Moon MK1 lunar lander is supposed to launch on New Glenn this fall for NASA's CLPS program. That mission is the pathfinder for Artemis III, which needs Blue Moon MK2 to fly on New Glenn in mid-2027 to land astronauts at the lunar south pole. Every month LC-36 sits damaged pushes Artemis further into the late 2020s.
Jeff Bezos has two companies betting on the same rocket. Amazon Leo needs 24 New Glenn launches to close the gap with Starlink. NASA needs New Glenn for Artemis. Both timelines just broke simultaneously, and LC-36 is on fire.
Zitat Gavin Richmond@tweetsiphotos Photos from ~5000ft of the aftermath from last night's hotfire anomaly involving New Glenn at SLC-36. 4:05 PM · May 29, 2026
Eric Berger@SciGuySpace Early reports that one tower and the transporter erector at LC-36A were damaged beyond repair appear to be true. 4:32 PM · May 29, 2026
Zitat Eric S. Raymond@esrtweet I just watched quarter-speed footage of the New Glenn explosion, and I noticed something interesting about it.
I am not an expert on explosion physics or chemistry. However, I do know one thing that is powerfully relevant, and that is that the kind of gaudy fireball we saw is not a natural result of high explosives going off. People only think it is because their ideas about how explosions look and sound are largely a creation of Hollywood special effects.
Real explosions are a lot less visually spectacular, and even sound different - they tend to rumble rather than producing sharp popping and cracking reports the way this one did.
In reality, pyrotechnicians have to do rather elaborate things to get that Hollywood effect. They have to aerosolize the fuel and semi-disperse it before they detonate. It's the same way fuel-air bombs work.
Which makes me think that what happened here is they were actually two explosions. A relatively small primary one that ruptured the main propellant tank and vaporized a bunch of the fuel and oxidizer. Then a secondary one, much bigger and nastier, when the aerosolized mixture went off.
I think it's pretty likely that something similar occurred during the only rocket explosion in history that was clearly larger than this one - the detonation of the Soviet N-1 rocket in 1969 2:08 PM · May 29, 2026
Zitat The last major launch pad explosion at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station was back in September 2016 when a helium tank rupture caused a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket to explode at Space Launch Complex 40, a few miles north of Launch Complex 36.
Because SpaceX already had multiple launch pads when that explosion happened, it was able to resume Falcon 9 launches from Vandenberg Space Force Base in January 2017, followed a month later by its first launch from pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center. However, it wasn’t until the launch of CRS-13 in December 2017 when SpaceX returned to flying rockets off of pad 40.
Zitat Josh Kale@JoshKale This New Glenn rocket explosion released 20% of the energy of the Hiroshima atomic bomb and that wasn't even the bad part:
→ The pad: LC-36 is the only pad on Earth that launches New Glenn and now it's gone. Over $1B to build. SpaceX needed 7 months to rebuild after a similar hit.
→ The deadline: Amazon needs 1,618 satellites up by July 30 to keep its FCC license. It has ~300. The rocket that was supposed to help fix that just blew up twice in a row
SpaceX made us believe that landing rockets on barges was a normal expectation. Turns out rocket science is hard after all. Wishing the team a speedy recovery 🚀 3:23 PM · May 29, 2026
Asher B.@asherbphotos There's a lot to unpack with LC-36 since New Glenn's explosion last night, so here's a thread on everything I saw from the air this morning: https://x.com/asherbphotos/status/2060423094494277675
Zitat Overly Trev@OverlyTrev Can Blue Moon fly on Falcon Heavy?
• Blue Moon MK1 specs: 8.05 m tall × 3.08 m diameter (legs folded) — built for New Glenn’s 7 m fairing but super compact. • Falcon Heavy fairing: 5.2 m diameter × 13.2 m tall, enough clearance on all sides. • Blue Moon weighs 21.35 tons when fully fueled. • TLI capacity for Falcon Heavy (estimated from performance models and delta-v analysis): ≈ 20–22 tons in fully expendable mode.
Technically this could be done with Blue Moon being fully expendable. A joint collaboration between @NASAMoonBase, @blueorigin, and @SpaceX could be an amazing opportunity 🇺🇸
Yes, this image is not completely accurate but is just a visual representation. 8:28 PM · May 29, 2026
ΔRobin→@SpaceMan1324·49m It can easily do it, FH doesn't even need to boost it into TLI because Blue Moon does that itself. Problem is getting the liquid hydrogen fuel into Blue Moon before launch, some sort of groundside utilities would need to be designed and constructed
Overly Trev@OverlyTrev·32m Good point about the TLI. Didn’t think about the liquid hydrogen, but still definitely doable. I wonder if they’re at all considering this.
Zitat Canraptor ☄️@canraptor_ It’s 2011, the Shuttle is retired, SpaceX carries the US Space Program It’s 2014, Russia withholds ULA’s engines, SpaceX carries the US Space Program It’s 2020, OneWeb goes bankrupt, SpaceX carries the US Space Program It’s 2023, Russia & Ariane withdraw from international markets, SpaceX carries the US Space Program It’s 2024, Starliner fails, SpaceX carries the US Space Program It’s 2025, Roscosmos loses their pad, SpaceX carries the US Space Program It’s 2026, Blue Origin loses their pad, SpaceX carries the US Space Program
Zitat Dave Limp@davill We have regained some access to Launch Complex 36 and are actively investigating the hotfire anomaly. We will start clearing the pad soon and have a good rebuild plan in place. The booster and GS2s in the integration facility appear healthy from quick looks. 6:28 PM · May 30, 2026
NSF - NASASpaceflight.com@NASASpaceflight Really surprised (in a good way) Never Tell Me The Odds survived that overpressure wave. Now for the rebuild of the pad. Remember, they were already planning to build a new one at the old LC-11 area, so we might see two new sets of pad towers rising at the same time. 6:42 PM · May 30, 2026
Zitat 'A pretty significant setback': How Blue Origin's rocket explosion affects NASA's moon plans
The shockwaves from Thursday's explosion will reverberate all the way to the moon.
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.
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 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.
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."
Zitat Rocketry@SpaceNews92 A flawless V3 liftoff, ruined by an invisible wave of liquid oxygen. Booster 19’s rapid flip sent propellant past the internal baffles, starving the Raptors at boostback. The fluid dynamics behind Flight 12's failure: 10:30 PM · May 31, 2026
Zitat Yes, propellant slosh during the rapid flip maneuver is the leading explanation for Booster 19’s problems on Starship Flight 12. SpaceX’s official update described the sequence clearly: after hot-staging and separation, the booster performed its directional flip for the boostback burn but couldn’t light all the planned Raptor 3 engines. It only managed a partial, abbreviated boostback burn, then failed to properly relight enough engines for the landing burn, resulting in an uncontrolled hard splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico. One engine had already shut down early during ascent, but the main failure occurred during the post-separation flip and relight attempts.
Why slosh fits the data
The Super Heavy’s massive tanks (especially the LOX tank) contain a huge volume of cryogenic propellant. A fast, high-acceleration flip creates strong fluid motion — low-frequency waves and sloshing that can overwhelm or bypass existing internal baffles. When the liquid propellant shifts away from the engine inlets at the bottom of the tank, the Raptors ingest vapor/gas instead of liquid (propellant starvation or vapor ingestion). This causes engines to fail to ignite, shut down quickly, or run rough.
Multiple analysts, flight data reviews, and community breakdowns point to this exact mechanism. It’s a classic large-rocket fluid-dynamics challenge that has appeared in earlier Starship flights too, though V3’s more aggressive maneuver profile or slightly different tank/fuel levels may have made it worse this time. The FAA declared it a “mishap” and required a formal investigation (SpaceX is leading it under FAA oversight), so the final root-cause report isn’t public yet. But all available evidence and telemetry point strongly to slosh-induced starvation rather than a fundamental engine hardware failure.
How SpaceX can solve it
SpaceX has a strong track record of rapidly iterating on these issues using flight data. Likely fixes include: - Better baffles / slosh suppressors — Add more, redesigned, or strategically placed baffles inside the tanks to dampen wave motion and keep propellant over the inlets during high-g maneuvers. - Header tanks or PMDs (Propellant Management Devices) — Use smaller “header” tanks or surface-tension devices (diaphragms, sponges, or capillary screens) that stay full and feed the engines reliably even when the main tanks are sloshing. - Ullage / settling thrusters — Small thrusters or cold-gas jets that fire briefly before engine relight to settle the propellant toward the bottom of the tanks. - Maneuver profile changes — Slightly slower or differently timed flip, adjusted grid-fin authority, or different engine shutdown/relight sequencing to reduce peak slosh excitation. - Advanced modeling & active control — Improved CFD simulations of fluid-structure interaction plus real-time sensors (or even cameras inside the tanks on future flights) to predict and actively manage slosh. - Spin stabilization (less common) — Some have suggested controlled rotation to use centrifugal force to keep propellant pinned, though this is harder with Starship’s current design.
Zur Erinnerung: bei der Stufentrennung ist SpaceX zum "hot staging" übergegangen, bei dem die Startstufe noch unter Schub steht. Nach Brennschluß herrscht in der Startstufe Schwerelosigkeit. Da der Schub zum einen über die Methan-O2-Reaktion erzeugt wird, aber isg. erheblich höher als bei der Block-2-Version liegt, bei 33 Triebwerken, dürfte das verbliebene Treibstoffvolumen um einiges größer ausfallen als bisher, mit entsprechend höherer Trägheit/Schwerpunktverlagerung in der 3. Potenz. Der Schub auf Meereshöhe ist auf 280 t gegenüber 230 t bei Raptor 2 erhöht worden. Die Ausfallkaskade der 16 Triebwerke nach der Neuzündung dürfte sich der Einsparung des Hitzeschilds bei der Raptor-3-Version verdanken. Andererseits hat genau dieses Wegkürzen die Erhöhung der Nutzlast von 33 auf 100 Tonnen für die niedrige Erdumlaufbahn ermöglicht.
"Les hommes seront toujours fous; et ceux qui croient les guérir sont les plus fous de la bande." - Voltaire
New Glenn Rocket Explosion Aftermath - 2026-05-31- Uploaded about 10 hours ago
Harry Stranger / SpaceFromSpace New Glenn Rocket Explosion Aftermath - 2026-05-31 Uploaded about 10 hours ago
An 70cm/pixel satellite image of Blue Origin's Launch Complex 36 following the recent explosion of the company's New Glenn rocket which heavily damaged the pad.
Zitat Dave Limp@davill Some LC-36 updates. Now that we’ve had access to the pad and integration facility we can share a bit of good news. The propellant farm, oxygen, liquid hydrogen and LNG tanks are all in good shape. This is good luck because these are very long lead items. The water tower is also good. The big support tower is damaged, but it can be repaired in place rather than torn down and replaced. The booster “Never Tell Me The Odds” and the three GS-2s that were onsite in the integration facility also look good.
I’ve seen some speculation that we might move directly to the 9x4 configuration, but we won’t do that. Rate manufacturing of 7x2 is going well, and we’re going to continue that at pace as planned and store the stages for use. In addition, we had already been working for some time on eliminating our transporter-erector in favor of an alternative vertical conop, and we’ll now go directly to that; so we don’t need a new transporter-erector.
We will fly again before the end of this year. Gradatim Ferociter. 5:45 AM · Jun 2, 2026
Zitat Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp, in an overnight post on the social media platform X, said propellant tanks at launch pad 36 at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station made it through the blast in good shape, as did a nearby processing hangar. The main support gantry, while damaged, can be repaired in place.
“Now that we’ve had access to the pad and integration facility we can share a bit of good news,” Limp said. “The propellant farm, oxygen, liquid hydrogen and LNG [cryogenic methane] tanks are all in good shape. This is good luck because these are very long lead items.
“The water tower is also good. The big support tower is damaged, but it can be repaired in place rather than torn down and replaced.” ... Such “hot-fire” tests are fairly routine in the rocket industry, giving engineers a chance to test launch-day fueling procedures, a booster’s propulsion system and critical ground and flight software while the rocket remains securely bolted to its launch pad.
But it was far from routine last Thursday.
As the New Glenn’s seven BE-4 engines began igniting and throttling up, a fire broke out at the base of the booster and moments later, now engulfed in flames, the rocket exploded in a tremendous fireball, shaking the ground for miles around in a conflagration visible all the way across the Florida peninsula.
Footage captured by photo journalists from a helicopter the next day showed the rocket and its transporter-erector had been destroyed, at least some support beams at the base of the main gantry were either bent or blown away and a separate lightning tower had collapsed in a tangle of debris.
Unlike rival SpaceX, which has two operation pads in Florida and one in California, Blue Origin only has pad 36. The company already had plans to build a second pad at the Cape and another at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. But in the near term, New Glenns cannot fly until pad 36 is repaired. ... Limp’s vow to resume flights by the end of the year might imply the “root cause” of the explosion might not have been an engine problem that would take months to correct and then test. Or at least, not a major design flaw.
That would be good news for United Launch Alliance, a partnership between Boeing and Lockheed Martin. ULA uses Blue Origin’s BE-4 engines in the first stage of its new Vulcan rocket. A drawn-out engine failure investigation would be a setback for ULA, but the BE-4s have not yet been blamed for the New Glenn mishap.
Zitat With this update, Limp has answered some of the key questions Blue Origin faced in the aftermath of Thursday’s dramatic failure. Most significantly, the company intends to rebuild the damaged launch site and return to flight as rapidly as possible with the 7×2 variant of the New Glenn booster that had previously performed very well. With this aggressive timeline—about six months—the company may also be indicating a desire to limit discussion of launching its Blue Moon lander on the Falcon Heavy rocket built by its competitor, SpaceX.
Still, this is a risky move for Blue Origin, and especially for NASA. A six-month timeline to return to flight is very optimistic. The LC-36A site will need serious rework, from its concrete foundation on up. Some of these materials require fairly long lead times, and it’s not clear that the company has the personnel needed—particularly the touch-labor technicians, welders, and others who build this specialized launch hardware. Historically, Blue Origin has not operated in such a rushed manner, either.
What’s a realistic timeline?
Multiple sources said a more realistic timeline for Blue Origin to rebuild its pad and launch from there is 12 to 18 months. If this were to occur, it would significantly set back NASA and its Artemis Program, which is relying on the New Glenn rocket and Blue Moon lander for both cargo and eventually crewed missions to the lunar surface.
In his message, Limp did not specify the cause of the failure, but speculation has focused on one of the first stage’s main engines failing during a static fire test. This quickly ruptured the first and then second stage of the rocket.
This is perhaps the least interesting part of the story, though. New Glenn has already flown three times, and across that rocket and the Vulcan vehicle it also powers, the BE-4 engine has a fine track record. Blue Origin should be able to identify the cause of the failure and get the rocket flying safely again. The challenge is finding somewhere to launch it from.
Zitat X Freeze@XFreeze·10h SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell just laid out the official launch roadmap for Starship, and the cadence is about to go vertical
Here's the timeline: • Flight 13: Launch is roughly a month away • Flight 14: The big one. SpaceX intends to attempt a full orbital injection • Post-Flight 14 Cadence: SpaceX plans to transition to an unprecedented launch rate of flying every single month
Shotwell confirmed they expect Starship to be fully operational in orbit by the end of this year. The regulatory approval from the FAA remains the primary bottleneck, but the manufacturing and engineering pipeline is completely locked in 1:26 AM · Jun 15, 2026
Zitat Rebuild underway at Blue Origin’s Florida launch pad. Blue Origin has started rebuilding a launch pad severely damaged in a New Glenn explosion less than three weeks ago as it works to resume launches by the end of the year, Space News reports. Jeff Bezos and Dave Limp, Blue Origin’s owner and CEO, spoke about the pad rebuild at the VivaTech conference in Paris. Limp said Launch Complex 36 has been cleared of all debris, and crews “started the reconstruction” of the pad earlier this week. Both reiterated their earlier statements that Blue Origin will fly the New Glenn rocket again before the end of the year, an achievement that would defy the expectations of many officials at NASA.
Zitat Blue Origin begins rebuilding New Glenn pad - by Jeff Foust June 18, 2026
“It was a gut punch for the whole team,” Bezos said. “But what we’ve learned since then is that we got really lucky. Some of the long-lead items in the launch infrastructure were preserved.”
That included a propellant tank farm at the pad, as well as a New Glenn booster used on the previous two launches that was in an integration hangar near the pad. “Various pieces of shrapnel missed the booster,” he said. “There was a lot of good luck in that incident.”
Limp said the company was able to call in a construction crew “just down the road” with 400 pieces of heavy equipment to work on cleaning up the pad. “The pad has been cleared of all debris. It’s amazing how quickly that’s happened,” he said.
“Just yesterday we started the reconstruction” of the pad, he said. “We’re going to fly this year.”
“We’ll fly before the end of the year,” Bezos added.
Neither Bezos nor Limp discussed what caused the explosion or what changes the company will need to make to the vehicle or to pad infrastructure in response. Limp previously said the company would move to an “alternative vertical conop,” or concept of operations, for installing the rocket on the pad, eliminating the need to replace the transporter-erector.
...
The company has continued work on the Blue Moon lander while recovering from the New Glenn explosion. That included a recent test of the BE-7 engine that powers the lander, during which the engine fired continuously for 41 minutes, the longest such test ever. The extended test, Bezos said, was needed because “the reliability of this engine is paramount.”
On social media, Limp posted a video of the full 41-minute test. “I’ve come to appreciate boring hotfires,” he wrote.
Zitat Blue Origin begins rebuilding New Glenn pad - by Jeff Foust June 18, 2026
Zitat Dave Limp@davill Quite a sight to see the progress this team has made since May 28. Wreckage recovery from start to finish was completed in 9 days, and all debris has been cleared from Launch Complex 36. Huge shoutout to the team who have been working 7x24. We have started reconstruction and still plan to fly again this year. Will have more details on the new conop soon. 2:32 PM · Jun 25, 2026
Zitat Blue Origin has started rebuilding the launch pad damaged by an explosive accident last month, but the company is working from a very different blueprint this time around.
The company's huge New Glenn rocket exploded on May 28 during a routine engine test at Launch Complex 36A (LC-36A) at Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The rocket was destroyed, as were some important pieces of pad infrastructure, including the lightning tower and the transporter-erector, which hauled New Glenn from its integration facility to the pad and raised it vertical upon arrival.
Blue Origin has vowed to bounce back quickly, aiming to fly the 320-foot-tall (98-meter) New Glenn again by the end of the year. Getting LC-36A rebuilt is a high priority, for the pad is currently New Glenn's only jumping-off point. And Blue Origin has made significant progress on this front the company announced today (June 30).
"Hardware recovery and debris removal operations are complete, and reconstruction of the pad has started," the company's CEO, Dave Limp, said in a statement today.
Reconstruction will not create a facsimile of the original LC-36A, however. Blue Origin is building a new version of the pad, one that lines up with a new concept of operations (ConOps) for New Glenn launches.
"We're moving to a horizontal/vertical hybrid configuration to get us flying again this year at 36A," Limp said via X today. "Let me explain what that means. We mate the stages horizontally in the Integration Facility (IF). Then we bring the integrated vehicle out to the pad, use a crane to perform the vertical breakover, and mate the payload once New Glenn is vertical. This new ConOps has the added benefit of increasing our flight cadence as well."
So the refurbished LC-36A will have a crane rather than a transporter-erector, and payload mating will occur at the pad rather than inside the IF.
According to Limp, Blue Origin had already been planning to employ this "hybrid" ConOps for the super-heavy version of New Glenn that it's developing, called the 9X4. That name references the engine configuration of the coming vehicle: nine of Blue Origin's BE-4s on its first stage and four BE-3Us in its upper stage.
The current version of New Glenn is a 7X2. It can haul about 50 tons (45 metric tons) of payload to low Earth orbit. The 9X4 will be able to carry 77 tons (70 metric tons) to LEO and will also feature a bigger payload fairing — one that's 28.5 feet (8.7 meters) wide rather than 23 feet (7 m).
Blue Origin had already been developing another Cape Canaveral pad, LC-36B, to accommodate 9X4 launches. That pad is being readied for the "hybrid" ConOps as well, according to Limp.
Today's update also let us know that Blue Origin has made some progress in its investigation into the May 28 anomaly, though more work needs to be done.
"The vehicle is highly instrumented with extensive data from multiple camera angles and sensors, giving us confidence in our ability to identify and correct the root cause," Limp wrote. "Early analysis points to the aft section of the first stage."
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