Blue Origin plans to launch New Glenn again this year after the explosion

Blue Origin plans to launch its New Glenn rocket again in 2026 despite last week’s massive explosion, according to CEO Dave Limp.

Lemp said on Monday that most of the launch pad infrastructure was in “good shape” than expected after the explosion that occurred during testing at the company’s site in Cape Canaveral, Florida. Another previously launched New Glenn rocket booster that was at the launch complex, along with three of the rocket’s upper stages, “also looks good,” Lemp also said.

“We will fly again before the end of this year,” he said.

It’s an aggressive timetable for getting back into the air after the biggest and most glaring failure in the company’s history. Many people in the space industry have assumed that it will take Blue Origin until at least 2027 before launching New Glenn again, especially because there appears to be a lot of damage to the launch pad — the only one Blue Origin has at the moment that can support New Glenn.

Blue Origin also did not say what caused the explosion.

The company now finds itself in a unique strategic position. While SpaceX recovered within months after one of its Falcon 9 rockets exploded on a launch pad in 2016, this quick turnaround was due to the fact that it had a second pad almost ready at the time of the accident. Blue Origin is building a second launch pad at Cape Canaveral, but that project is still in its very early stages.

NASA is counting on Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket for a series of planned Artemis missions to the moon. Jeff Bezos’ spaceflight company has shifted its focus entirely to this program in order to support those missions, announcing in January that it would pause space tourism flights on the much smaller New Shepard rocket for at least two years.

New Glenn’s first launch took place in January 2025, after spending many years in development – and suffering from a number of delays. This inaugural launch was largely successful, with the upper stage reaching orbit on its first attempt, but the booster stage exploded on its way back to Earth. New Glenn’s second launch, in November, saw Blue Origin put a pair of Mars-bound spacecraft into space and land its first booster stage on a drone ship. The company flew the booster stage back in April on the New Glenn III mission, but the upper stage suffered a failure and lost its customer payload — the AST SpaceMobile satellite.

Blue Origin was preparing to launch a group of satellites for Bezos’s other company, Amazon, in the fourth launch. The spaceflight company had not yet put those satellites on board, so they were not destroyed in the explosion.

While there has been some speculation that Blue Origin might step straight into a larger, more powerful version of the New Glenn when it returns to flight, Limp shot down that idea on Monday. However, the company will change the way it carries its rockets to the launch pad, and how it stands on them. Previously, Blue Origin used what it called a “transport craft,” which could handle both tasks. Limp did not specify what Blue Origin’s new solution would look like.