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

The explosion will likely mean that Blue Origin will have to pause its New Glenn rocket program for an extended period of time while it works to work out what went wrong. Blue Origin was planning to try up to 12 New Glenn launches this year, after the company spent about 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. Blue Origin aims to launch national security missions for the Pentagon as well.

“Too bad. The missiles are powerful,” Elon Musk wrote on X shortly after the explosion. “I hope you recover quickly.”

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

A new and very late missile

Blue Origin spent years developing New Glenn while using its New Shepard program to test smaller suborbital rockets. While New Shepard ferried a fairly regular group of the rich and famous (along with some scientific 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.

This work has been a long time coming — longer than Blue Origin expected — but it finally came to a head in January 2025, when the company flew the New Glenn for the first time.

New Glenn seems to have been a fairly successful rocket from the start. 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 had more success with its second New Glenn mission, in November 2025. During that mission, the company launched two spacecraft to Mars for NASA. Blue Origin also landed the first booster stage during the second New Glenn mission.

This allowed the company to relaunch the rocket on the New Glenn III mission, demonstrating the ability to not only recover the first stage, but also refurbish it for reuse – a crucial step in reducing the overall cost of operating the launch business.

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

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

Late Thursday, Congressman Mike Haridopoulos (R-Fla.), who represents the district where Cape Canaveral is located, wrote on X that he had spoken with NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman about the explosion.

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

This story is evolving. Check back for updates.