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As Blue Origin tells it, the most spectacular launchpad explosion in recent memory, which destroyed its pioneering New Glenn space rocket last month and severely damaged almost everything around it, was merely a blip.
“We will fly again before the end of this year. Gradatim Ferociter,” Dave Limp, the company’s chief executive, posted on X on 1 June, using the Latin form of its motto, “Step by step, ferociously”.
John Couluris, Blue Origin’s senior vice-president of lunar permanence, amplified the assertion at this week’s Nasa event in Houston, at which the crew for next year’s Artemis III mission was announced.
“As you know, we had a significant anomaly,” he said. “The response from Nasa, our partners and customers has been extraordinary. We’re making excellent progress on the investigation and pad cleanup.”
Given the magnitude of the catastrophic fireball at Cape Canaveral space force station’s launch complex 36A, an explosion visible more than 100 miles to the south, you would be forgiven for thinking Blue Origin’s statements and recovery timeline were blindly optimistic.
The disaster was seen immediately by analysts as a significant setback to Nasa’s ambitious moon plans. Just two days earlier, Jared Isaacman, the agency’s administrator, announced Blue Origin had won a contract to launch the first of three construction missions planned for this year for the agency’s ambitious $20bn moon base project. That flight appeared to be almost certainly doomed.
But what has transpired since has been an all-hands effort to identify what went wrong and get New Glenn swiftly back to flight, a response unmatched in speed and intensity since the Columbia space shuttle tragedy of 2003.
Isaacman, among the first to survey the wrecked pad, promised a “whole government response” to help Blue Origin, reflective of the importance of Jeff Bezos’s company to Nasa’s moon schedule.
“Everybody is responding quickly. Nasa is going to deploy subject matter experts to help with the investigation to get to the root cause of the problem [and] help them rebuild the pad,” he said on Fox News last week.
“We are doing everything we can to support Blue Origin, their New Glenn program, [and] the lander that we need for the lunar surface.”
As well as Nasa’s support, Blue Origin enjoys Bezos’s deep pockets, and will have the full resources of Space Force available for the rebuild on its base, the military wing’s chief of space operations, Gen Chance Saltzman, has said.
The urgency is because of Artemis III, planned for late 2027, when the crewed lander referenced by Isaacman – Blue Moon – will be tested with SpaceX’s Starship Human Landing System (HLS). The two are vying for selection for the scheduled 2028 mission of Artemis IV, when humans will return to the lunar surface for the first time since 1972.
Blue Origin is designed to fly only on the New Glenn rocket, and Nasa faced the very real possibility that Artemis III, which was to have tested both landers in lower Earth orbit, would take place only with HLS and Starship, a configuration that has followed its own bumpy path.
Another possible scenario is reconfiguring Blue Moon to fly on a different rocket, such as SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy. It is an option Nasa is reportedly urging Blue Origin to pursue, but one that could create a further delay to the Artemis program.
For that reason, Isaacman appears more eager to have New Glenn restored to flight. To keep options open, he told Fox, the agency was “decoupling” Blue Moon from both the rocket and the launchpad.
“Nasa is laser-focused on the lander, because we’re laser-focused on our mission to return astronauts to the surface of the moon before 2028,” he said.
“We’re going to be able to keep that lander in development, progressing, so it’s available for our test mission in 2027, which is Artemis III, and potentially available to meet our landing objectives in 2028.”
The explosion, he said, was “a setback that happens in this business”.
He said: “It’s incredibly complicated. A rocket is a controlled explosion. It’s an awful lot of energy. Things will happen. We have to learn from it and be ready to move forward.”
Limp’s tweet, meanwhile, and Couluris’s subsequent comments, suggest that the launchpad damage is not as bad as first feared, and could be repaired sooner than originally thought.
“The propellant farm, oxygen, liquid hydrogen and LNG [liquefied natural gas] tanks, are all in good shape,” Limp said.
“This is good luck because these are very long lead items. The water tower is also good. The big support tower is damaged, but it can be repaired in place rather than torn down and replaced.”
Space experts say the pace of Blue Origin’s recovery depends on how quickly it can figure out what went wrong.
“We don’t know what happened, and so we don’t know what expertise is required to fix it, so I don’t want to proclaim an obituary on Blue Origin,” said John Logsdon, founder and former director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, and a former member of the Nasa advisory council.
“There are good people involved and the resources are available. I think we have to have a bit of patience.”
Logsdon said spaceflight’s long, chequered history is punctuated by setbacks and delays ranging from minor technological inconveniences to launchpad explosions, and full-on, in-space disasters, including two space shuttle tragedies, Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003, that saw 14 crew members lose their lives.
“My reference point is past experience,” he said. “I remind you of the Apollo I fire in January 1967 that killed three people, and we didn’t stop, we fixed the problem and went on, and I think that’s the most likely situation now in recovering from this accident.
“It’s important to recognise that this is a setback. Mr Bezos says that they are going to spend the money required, whatever that amount is, to get back flying, and he certainly has enough money.”
Other experts say the company’s return-to-flight timeline is more likely to be affected by ground logistics, especially if the launchpad damage turns out to be worse than initial assessments.
“Blue Origin should be able to identify the cause of the failure and get the rocket flying safely again. The challenge is finding somewhere to launch it from,” Eric Berger, senior space editor for Ars Technica, wrote in an early analysis of the explosion last week that called the timeline “aggressive”.
