CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin is assessing damage to its launch pad after a rocket exploded during a test firing, creating a giant orange fireball seen and felt for miles around.
The company fueled the massive New Glenn rocket Thursday night, hoping to briefly ignite the engines ahead of a satellite launch next week. But the 321-foot (98-meter), rocket blew up, taking part of the pad with it.
Emergency officials on Friday warned the public to avoid any wreckage that might wash ashore and to instead call 911.
Named after John Glenn, the first American in orbit, New Glenn is the rocket that Blue Origin plans to use to launch landers to the moon under NASA’s Artemis program that aims to build a sprawling base near the moon’s south pole. The goal is to land the first Artemis moonwalkers as early as 2028. Earlier this week, the space agency awarded a new contract to Blue Origin worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
None of the 48 Amazon Leo satellites were on board when the rocket exploded. Another batch of Amazon Leo satellites — competing with SpaceX’s Starlinks to provide internet service to remote locales — awaited liftoff several miles away at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, courtesy of United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V rocket.
Within 12 hours of the explosion, SpaceX launched more Starlinks to orbit Friday morning. CEO Elon Musk has two pads in action, one on the Space Force side where the latest Falcon 9 lifted off and the other at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.
Blue Origin has just the one pad in Florida. Its smaller New Shepard rockets soar from Texas, skimming space for a few minutes with tourists and science experiments. Those suborbital hops were paused in January so the company could focus on New Glenn and upcoming moonshots. All that is now on hold, pending the investigation into the explosion.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Marcia Dunn, The Associated Press
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