A Blue Origin New Glenn rocket experienced an anomaly during a ground test known as a hot fire on Thursday, the company shared on X. No one was injured. This New Glenn rocket explosion released 20% of the energy of the Hiroshima atomic bomb.
The LC-36 is the only pad on Earth that launches New Glenn, and now it’s also gone. It cost over $1 billion to build. SpaceX needed 7 months to rebuild after a similar hit.
Amazon has a deadline on a contract with NASA and needs to launch 1,618 satellites by July 30 to keep its FCC license. They are going to need an extension.
Launch Pad 36 in Cape Canaveral has now had 2 of the largest rocket explosions in U.S. history. In 1965, an Atlas-Centaur exploded on the pad.
Here’s our video of the explosion at Launch Complex 36. It happened about 9 pm ET (0100 UTC) as Blue Origin was beginning a static fire test of its New Glenn rocket.
Watch live views: https://t.co/tm2wZQmAVD pic.twitter.com/PmbgQC6Qmq
— Spaceflight Now (@SpaceflightNow) May 29, 2026
New Glenn explosion as seen from my Ring doorbell during my pizza delivery!! #blueorigin #newglenn @NASASpaceflight pic.twitter.com/iQVmLepM6N
— Hunter Manley (@huntermanley) May 29, 2026
The Contract Exploded Too
NASA has awarded contracts worth nearly $1 billion to Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, Astrolab, Lunar Outpost, and Firefly Aerospace Inc. to build and deliver early infrastructure for a permanent moon base, the agency’s first major commercial procurement push under its revised Artemis program.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy issued warnings 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.”
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 expects 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 built a lunar lander that looks more like a traditional Apollo-style vehicle. But it blew up during a test flight.
This is a disaster for Blue Origin, which has been working on this at great expense for 25 years.