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

Blue Origin’s massive New Glenn rocket has just exploded during testing at the launch site in Cape Canaveral, Florida, according to To live broadcast From NASASpaceFlight.com. Blue Origin later confirmed the explosion.

Jeff Bezos’ space company has been conducting a static fire test ahead of an expected fourth launch of the new rocket in the coming weeks. Blue original He said X posted on Thursday evening that “all employees have been accounted for.” The company did not say what went wrong, only that an “anomaly” had occurred. NASA, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the Space Force did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

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 attempt up to 12 launches of the New Glenn vehicle 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, as the agency highlights Blue Origin’s expected outlook role On this program earlier this week.

“Too bad. Rockets are hard,” Elon Musk books On X shortly after the explosion.

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 deliver an AST SpaceMobile satellite to 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.

This story is evolving. Check back for updates.