NASA’s Moon Plans Take A Hit After Rocket Explosion
An award-winning reporter writing about stargazing and the night sky.
Associated Press
A rocket being tested by Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin dramatically exploded on a launch pad at Cape Canaveral, Florida, on Thursday night. It comes just days after NASA awarded Blue Origin multiple contracts to launch payloads to the lunar surface in support of NASA’s moonbase program as the space agency attempts to create a permanent lunar base.
The explosion occurred at 9 p.m. EDT on Thursday, May 28, during a static test fire of Blue Origin’s New Glenn NG-4 super heavy lift rocket, named for NASA astronaut John Glenn, the first American to orbit Earth. It occurred on launch pad LC-36A while the rocket’s first stage was full of liquid methane. No one was injured.
Huge Fireball
The huge fireball, captured by NASASpaceflight.com, was perhaps the most powerful rocket explosion since the Soviet Union’s N1 rocket in 1957, according to Ars Technica.
“All personnel are accounted for and safe,” Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and Blue Origin, posted on X. “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.”
The rocket had been due to launch 48 satellites into low-Earth orbit next week as part of the Amazon Leo broadband internet access constellation, designed to directly challenge SpaceX’s Starlink constellation. It plans to deploy 3,236 satellites.
New Glenn Rocket Mishaps
It’s the second mishap for Blue Origin in six weeks. On April 19, New Glenn launched and landed without problems for only the third time. However, it failed to deliver its payload — AST SpaceMobile’s huge BlueBird 7 satellite — into the correct orbit. The company’s next three BlueBird satellites are scheduled for launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in mid-June.
The incidents are setbacks for the company as it attempts to challenge SpaceX for dominance in the heavy-lift rocket market.
Leave a Reply