In my noon post, I laid out the case that the spectacular failure of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket was a catastrophe for both Blue Origin and Amazon’s LEO satellite internet project.
It was a long post, and too packed with information to make it longer. There is only so much you can pack into a single blog post and keep it readable and coherent.
So here’s a follow-up. It turns out that the size of the metaphorical bomb crater left behind is far larger than most people seem to understand. The disaster wasn’t just for Blue Origin, but for NASA’s plans to build a base on the moon in the near future, and probably for companies that were relying on the Vulcan launch system to put their payloads into orbit.
The Vulcan Centaur is currently grounded due to solid rocket booster failures, but with suspicions now focused on a failure of a BE-4 engine on the New Glenn, it could be that 100% of the propulsion system for Vulcan Centaur is flawed and won’t be certified to return to space for even longer than we thought.
But it is the blow to NASA’s moon landings that will really hurt. We are in a race to the moon with China, and the failure of New Glenn calls into question whether Blue Origin’s moon lander can even reach lunar orbit.
Here’s why the failure of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket is so catastrophic https://t.co/S9IRN6dNAI
— Ars Technica (@arstechnica) May 29, 2026
Ars Technica does a preliminary deep dive on the explosion of NASA‘s space program caused by the explosion of New Glenn:
Blue Origin’s cargo lander has emerged as the supreme workhorse of the early stages of NASA’s Artemis program and Moon Base. It has a capacity to deliver up to 3 tons to the lunar surface and would serve as a pathfinder for a larger version of a lander to take humans to the Moon.
This week, NASA announced that its Moon Base I mission would fly on Blue Moon Mark 1, and it awarded Blue Origin $280.4 million to deliver two lunar rovers in 2028. Multiple other missions are planned on the lander, which was designed to be sent to the Moon on a single New Glenn vehicle.
Could Blue Moon Mark 1 launch on other rockets? SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy and United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan vehicles both likely have the lift capacity to push the vehicle to the Moon. But Vulcan is also sidelined at present and has a long line of Space Force payloads in the queue. So what of Falcon Heavy?
The Mark 1 lander is powered by the BE-7 engine, which runs on liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. There may be compatibility issues related to the Falcon rocket’s kerosene-powered upper stage, although this has not been confirmed. Also, it is unlikely that Blue Origin would partner with a direct rival, SpaceX, in this manner.
Artemis program
Due to the Mark 1 issues outlined above, there will either be significant delays to, or the need to restructure the early phases of, the Moon Base program. The lunar rovers under development by Astrolab and Lunar Outpost, for example, have a mass of about 1 ton. Only Mark 1 and SpaceX’s Starship have that kind of delivery capacity.
There are also major implications for the main Artemis crewed missions.
NASA recently changed Artemis III to become a mission that will see the Orion spacecraft rendezvous with one or both of the Human Landing Systems under development by Blue Origin (Blue Moon) and SpaceX (Starship) in low-Earth orbit. NASA appears determined to launch this mission in 2027 and plans to announce its four crew members in a couple of weeks.
But it’s now all but certain that a Blue Moon lander will not be ready for such a mission within the next 18 months. NASA will need to decide whether to wait on Blue Origin or press ahead solely with a Starship mission.
Blue Moon the lander Blue Origin is building, was the more traditional choice for bringing cargo to the moon in the early stages. SpaceX’s Human Landing System is unlikely to be ready in time to meet NASA’s aggressive deadlines, as the original Starship is still in development and SpaceX will have to build refueling vehicles and a Starship moon lander. Space refueling is untested at this scale and complexity, and any Musk project can be counted on to be late.
Starship may become the long-term workhorse, but Blue Moon was the safer path to getting to the moon with cargo fast. Now it’s unclear if it can get off the launch pad any time soon.
As for Artemis IV, the lunar landing mission, this failure further complicates that plan. It is difficult to imagine a scenario in which a crew-rated Blue Moon lander is ready at any point in 2028 now. Even if the hardware is far along, Blue Origin still needs to fly test missions with Blue Moon Mark 1, which are on hold indefinitely.
A number of senior NASA officials had come to view Blue Origin’s plan to use a slimmed down version of the Mark 2 lander, which would not require in-space refueling, as the prime option for Artemis IV. Now, like much of the US space industry, NASA finds itself highly dependent on SpaceX’s ability to deliver with Starship.
Is it possible that SpaceX can deliver a miracle in time to win the race? Or, for that matter, is it possible for Blue Origin to put a Blue Moon lander in space?
Sure, it is. But I wouldn’t put the betting odds on either happening soon enough.
Of course, we may be overestimating China’s ability to land men on the moon in the next few years. They have advanced rapidly in recent years and have very deep pockets, but landing on the moon is very, very hard. China has done it with uncrewed landers, but many recent failures by companies and countries to land robots safely remind us that safely landing people on the moon is very risky.
The failure of the New Glenn rocket isn’t really a story about the space race between SpaceX and Blue Origin, as many people seem to think. Its implications go far beyond corporate competition. New Glenn’s destruction and likely inability to launch again until sometime next year or even 2028 is a disaster for NASA.
SpaceX alone can handle the “moving stuff to orbit” task, even though having multiple launch companies is better.
But it likely can’t, in the short run, bear the almost sole burden of landing men on the moon and building a moon base in the next few years. The Space Launch System can get you to the moon, but not onto it.
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