Blue Origin says rocket explosion spared fuel tanks and key launch pad parts

Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin says past week's rocket detonation spared substance tanks and immoderate different captious parts of the motorboat pad

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin said Tuesday that past week’s rocket detonation spared substance tanks and immoderate different captious parts of the motorboat pad.

Critical to NASA's Artemis satellite program, the company's monolithic New Glenn rocket blew up during an engine-firing trial astatine Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. A lightning operation and the transporter-erector utilized to determination and hoist the rocket were destroyed successful the blast that sent daze waves crossed the state.

CEO Dave Limp said the methane, hydrogen and oxygen tanks look to beryllium successful bully shape. The h2o vessel is besides good and the enactment operation that's inactive lasting tin beryllium repaired successful place. A booster and different rocket parts housed adjacent were not damaged.

Overall, this was “a spot of bully news,” Limp said successful an X update, adding: “We volition alert again earlier the extremity of this year.”

The origin is inactive nether investigation.

Just 2 days earlier the accident, NASA awarded a declaration worthy hundreds of millions of dollars to Blue Origin, choosing New Glenn rockets to motorboat a brace of rovers to the satellite up of the accomplishment of the archetypal Artemis moonwalkers who volition thrust them. New Glenn besides is needed to motorboat the company's Blue Moon lander that volition beryllium utilized to get astronauts to the lunar aboveground successful the coming years.

NASA is aiming for arsenic aboriginal arsenic 2028 for the archetypal satellite landing by astronauts since Apollo 17 successful 1972.

The abstraction bureau volition “do each we can” to get the pad backmost successful enactment arsenic soon arsenic imaginable “while staying highly focused connected progressing the lander,” Administrator Jared Isaacman said via X.

Blue Origin’s New Glenn enactment of reusable rockets — named aft John Glenn, the archetypal American successful orbit — has launched lone 3 times. It’s not astir arsenic large arsenic SpaceX’s Starship that is making trial flights to the fringes of abstraction from Texas. NASA has ordered up Starships, successful summation to Blue Moon landers, to get Artemis astronauts to the lunar aboveground successful the years ahead.

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