A Serious Blow for American Spaceflight
The loss of one New Glenn rocket has serious ramifications
During a static fire test last night, a full stack Blue Origin New Glenn booster being prepared for that rockets fourth flight violently exploded on the pad, severely damaging Launch Complex 36, and destroying the transport erector. The payload, a stack of Amazon Leo internet satellites, was not on board at the time and may still be able to be launched on another vehicle.
The company had been building towards a faster launch cadence, and had just demonstrated first stage reuse. The second stage anomaly from flight three had been addressed fairly rapidly, and things seemed to be going rather well for Blue Origin overall. Until suddenly they weren’t.
The loss of the vehicle and more importantly the ground infrastructure represents a huge setback for Blue Origin, but also has significant impacts on other parts of the US space program. The Artemis and Moonbase programs are now in jeopardy, multiple satellite constellations are going to be delayed, and there will be less redundancy and competition in launch for some time.
