Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket explodes during testing in Florida

Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket explodes during testing in Florida | TechCrunch

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Image Credits:Blue Origin Space

Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket explodes during testing in Florida

Sean O'Kane

6:22 PM PDT · May 28, 2026

Blue Origin’s New Glenn mega-rocket just exploded during testing at a launch site in Cape Canaveral, Florida, according to livestreams from NASASpaceFlight.com and SpaceFlight Now. Blue Origin later confirmed the explosion.

Jeff Bezos’ space company was performing a static fire test ahead of an anticipated fourth launch of the new rocket in the coming weeks, which was supposed to carry Amazon Leo internet satellites to space. That means the rocket was likely fully fueled, contributing to what is one of the largest rocket explosions in U.S. history and the worst failure in Blue Origin’s existence.

Blue Origin said in an X post Thursday evening that “[a]ll personnel have been accounted for,” and Bezos wrote that they were “safe.” The company didn’t say what went wrong, only that an “anomaly” occurred.

“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,” Bezos wrote.

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said in a post late Thursday that the agency will “work with our partners to support a thorough investigation of this anomaly, assess near-term mission impacts, and get back to launching rockets.”

In a statement, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) told TechCrunch it was aware of the explosion and said there was “no impact to air traffic.” NASA and the Space Force did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

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

The explosion likely means Blue Origin will have to pause the New Glenn rocket program for an extended period of time while it works through what went wrong. Blue Origin had been planning to attempt as many as 12 launches of New Glenn this year, after the company spent around a decade developing it in an attempt to compete with Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

The company is also supposed to help power NASA’s Artemis missions to the moon, with the agency highlighting Blue Origin’s expected role in that program earlier this week. Isaacman said Thursday that NASA will “provide any impacts to the Artemis and Moon Base programs as it becomes available.”

Blue Origin has been aiming to launch national security missions for the Pentagon as well.

“Most unfortunate. Rockets are hard,” Elon Musk wrote on X shortly after the explosion. “I hope you recover quickly.”

The explosion comes just a few weeks after Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket flew for the third time ever. That mission suffered its own failure when the New Glenn upper stage failed to put an AST SpaceMobile satellite into orbit, causing a total loss of the mission. Just last week, the FAA cleared New Glenn to fly again after Blue Origin completed an investigation into the cause of the failure.

A very new, late rocket

Blue Origin has spent years developing New Glenn while it used its New Shepard program to test out smaller-scale sub-orbital rockets. While New Shepard has ferried a fairly regular cadence of wealthy people and celebrities (along with some science missions) to the edge of space, Blue Origin was constantly working in the background to develop a rocket that could put real commercial payloads like large satellites into orbit.

That work took a long time — longer than Blue Origin had anticipated — but finally came to a head in January 2025, when the company flew New Glenn for the first time.

New Glenn appeared to be a fairly successful rocket right off the bat. It reached orbit during that first flight, though the booster stage exploded before Blue Origin could attempt to land it on a drone ship in the ocean.

Blue Origin was even more successful with New Glenn’s second flight, though, in November 2025. During that mission the company launched twin spacecraft to Mars for NASA. Blue Origin also landed its first booster stage during New Glenn’s second mission.

That allowed the company to re-fly the booster on New Glenn’s third mission, showing not only the ability to recover the first stage, but refurbish it for re-use — a critical step in reducing the overall cost of operating a launch business.

The re-used rocket booster had no problems flying again, and even landed a second time on one of Blue Origin’s drone ships, during New Glenn’s third mission in April 2026. But the company experienced a cryogenic failure in the upper stage during mission three, which led to the loss of the satellite.

This upcoming fourth mission was supposed to be the first of 24 launches for which Amazon has contracted Blue Origin. Amazon is currently building out a competitor to SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet network, which it calls Leo. On Wednesday, Amazon touted its ability to rely on Blue Origin to build the network, calling New Glenn a “reusable, heavy-lift rocket.”

Amazon confirmed to TechCrunch late Thursday that no Leo satellites were on board for this test.

Late Thursday, Congressman Mike Haridopolos (R-FL), who represents the district that is home to Cape Canaveral, wrote on X that he had spoken with NASA administrator Jared Isaacman about the explosion.

“I am grateful there were no reported injuries and thankful for the first responders, engineers, and launch crews who acted quickly. Praying for Florida’s Space Coast and everyone involved,” he said.

Topics Blue Origin, new glenn, rockets, Space

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Sean O'Kane

Sr. Reporter, Transportation

Sean O’Kane is a reporter who has spent a decade covering the rapidly-evolving business and technology of the transportation industry, including Tesla and the many startups chasing Elon Musk. Most recently, he was a reporter at Bloomberg News where he helped break stories about some of the most notorious EV SPAC flops. He previously worked at The Verge, where he also covered consumer technology, hosted many short- and long-form videos, performed product and editorial photography, and once nearly passed out in a Red Bull Air Race plane. You can contact or verify outreach from Sean by emailing sean.okane@techcrunch.com or via encrypted message at okane.01 on Signal.

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