Blue Origin's New Glenn blows up during static fire test

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.

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

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).

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!

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

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...

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

Blue Origin's tortoise slow-and-steady approach to development ia increasingly looking stupid.

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.

Tragic. But spaceflight isn't easy. Easy to have your expectations shifted as a watching fan after so many successful launches in recent times.

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.

Very unfortunate, but strategically this changes nothing for US spaceflight. If anything, SpaceX will continue to increase its dominance.

Also known as a Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly in engineer speak.

> A source indicated that one of the lightning towers may not be salvageable, and that the transporter-erector may also be damaged beyond repair.

My first thought is why wasn't the t-e moved away before launch?

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.

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…

Thats a very impressive bang

Yikes. That's a big bang.

Space launch is hard

There are massive machines filled with reactants under high pressure and cryogenic temperatures.

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

It looks like the explosion starts from the second stage

excessive fuel delivery failure probable IMO. The direction and source of explosion seemed localized at first.

Static fire more like dynamic fire

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.

Looks even crazier in this angle:

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

On the scale of bad 1-10 where 10 is the absolutely worst case this is a 12 easily.

(Elon’s strategy of blowing up smaller versions of their rockets more or less deliberately doesn’t sound so insane in the light of this.)

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 :)

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.

Did they blow up a pad? Or just a test stand?

EDIT: Oh crap, they took out a launch complex.

Blew Origin

There's got to be better way than burning a shittonne of fuel. Anyone else know?

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.

NSF live https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jm8wRjD3xVA

Shame. I would love to see a competitor rein in SpaceX.

Hooray! A static test fire caught a problem.

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

I will remember this when someone tells me how my little fireworks once a year is bad for environment.

So uh those Artemis commitments huh.

Video: https://xcancel.com/nasaspaceflight/status/20601649284728548...

Another angle: https://xcancel.com/SawyerMerritt/status/2060174287563116696...

[dead]

IPO must be in the works!

There's got to be better way than burning a shittonne of fuel. Anyone else know?

The timing of this so close to SpaceX IPO is seriously sus.

A kid's toy broke.

It makes me happy though -- to see a tax-evader adolescent Ersatz-toy fall into pieces, hopefully will delay the big ongoing tech-bro op to convert narcissism and tax dues into CO2.

Would be really curious to learn more about how rocket scientists are using (or not using) LLMs.

I asked Claude Opus 4.8 to estimate the size of the explosion in kilotons of TNT, and it estimated the explosion at 0.18 kilotons of TNT (with an ~0.13–0.26 error range).

For comparison, the N-1 rocket explosion was around 0.5 kilotons of TNT.

An unfortunate setback but rockets are hard.

The fact that the US has multiple extremely active commercial ventures plus a vibrant government programs with launches every few days just highlights har far ahead the US has become in this area of tech. Many people have never seen a rocket launch ever and yet for a big part of the US looking up in the sky and watching the amazing sight of a rocket going through staging is just a normal Tuesday evening.

That sort of expertise and base of scientists and engineers is not something other countries can just quickly replicate. For a while it looked like the US had put space on the back burner but now it’s back and bigger than ever before.

The occasional test going boom is just part of the fun in the end.