Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket was destroyed in an explosion at Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station shortly after 9 p.m. local time on Thursday, during what the company described as a static fire test of the booster's engines ahead of a planned orbital launch next week. The blast lit up the Florida coast and was felt in nearby Cape Canaveral and Cocoa Beach, where residents reported their homes shaking. No one was injured, officials at the Space Force station confirmed.
The vehicle had been counting down to a brief ignition of the seven methane-fuelled BE-4 engines that power New Glenn's reusable first stage, a routine pre-flight milestone intended to validate the propulsion system before launch. Blue Origin said the rocket "exploded during an engine-firing test" as the result of an anomaly, and that the cause was not yet known.
The rocket had been prepared to carry a batch of satellites for Amazon's Leo constellation, the low-Earth-orbit broadband network formerly branded Project Kuiper, with liftoff scheduled for next week. The loss of the vehicle removes one of the few heavy-lift boosters Amazon has available to deploy a constellation it is contractually obliged to build out on a regulatory timetable, and it compounds the launch-cadence pressure the network already faced.
Founder Jeff Bezos, who funds Blue Origin and owns Amazon, addressed the failure on the social platform X. "It's too early to know the root cause but we're already working to find it," he wrote, adding: "Very rough day, but we'll rebuild whatever needs rebuilding and get back to flying. It's worth it." The tone echoed the resilience-after-setback messaging common in the launch industry, where pad anomalies, while costly, are treated as recoverable.
New Glenn, named for the astronaut John Glenn, is central to Blue Origin's ambition to compete with SpaceX in heavy-lift launch. The vehicle reached orbit for the first time in early 2025 after years of delay, and the company has been working to raise its flight rate to service Amazon's network, US national-security payloads and, eventually, NASA missions. A pad explosion during ground testing is a markedly different failure from an in-flight loss, and investigators will focus on whether the fault lies in the engines, the propellant system or ground equipment.
The explosion is likely to ground Launch Complex 36 while damage is assessed and the pad is repaired, and to trigger a mishap review involving the Federal Aviation Administration and the Space Force. The duration of that process will determine how far Amazon's deployment schedule slips. Blue Origin gave no timeline on Friday for a return to flight beyond Bezos's pledge to rebuild.