At around 9 pm local time on the 28th of this month, Blue Origin's new generation heavy-lift launch vehicle "New Glenn", founded by Jeff Bezos, exploded during a static ignition test at Launch Station 36 of the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, causing the rocket's first-stage booster to be completely destroyed. Live video shows thatAfter ignition, a large amount of white smoke came out from the bottom, and exploded into fire in a very short time. The explosion was very fast and violent, completely surrounding the entire rocket from bottom to top in an instant, and then it exploded violently, with flames soaring into the sky and sputtering around. The scene was spectacular and terrifying.
In response to this incident, Blue Origin quickly issued a public apology, saying, "We would like to express our most sincere apologies to the general public who support and care about us. We have failed to live up to everyone's expectations."
At the same time, it was emphasized thatThe test site is far away from the residential area of Cape Canaveral. Before the start of the test, we worked with the local government to improve safety measures and organized the evacuation of surrounding people in advance.
The explosion occurred during the critical test phase of New Glenn's preparations for its fourth mission. At that time, the rocket was fixed on the launch pad and engineers were verifying whether its seven BE-4 liquid oxygen methane engines could ignite normally.
It is worth noting that this is only 4 days after Blue Origin received approval from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to resume launches (approved on May 24).
Previously, during the third launch mission (NG-3) on April 19, a BE-3U engine on New Glenn's upper stage froze the hydraulic pipeline due to a low-temperature leak, resulting in abnormal thrust. It failed to put AST SpaceMobile's BlueBird 7 communications satellite into the intended orbit, and the satellite eventually burned up in the atmosphere.
New Glenn is a heavy-lift launch vehicle developed by Blue Origin over many years with a total investment of approximately US$28 billion. It adopts a reusable design and the first-stage booster can be recycled and reused. It aims to compete with SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets in the commercial launch market.
The rocket not only undertakes commercial satellite launch missions, but also plans to participate in NASA's Artemis moon landing program and is responsible for launching Amazon's Project Kuiper Internet satellite constellation.
This explosion is the third major accident encountered by the New Glenn project.In addition to the launch failure in April, during the first launch mission in January this year, the first-stage booster was also damaged due to an engine restart failure..
