Blue Origin CEO: “We will fly again before the end of this year.”
New Glenn launchpad damage. Click for
video source.
In a tweet on X late yesterday, Blue Origin’s CEO David Limp gave a generally positive report of the damage to the launchpad and facilities after last week’s explosion during a static fire test of its New Glenn rocket.
The propellant farm, oxygen, liquid hydrogen and LNG tanks are all in good shape. 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. The booster “Never Tell Me The Odds” [first stage] and the three GS-2s [upper stages] that were onsite in the integration facility also look good.
…In addition, we had already been working for some time on eliminating our transporter-erector in favor of an alternative vertical conop, and we’ll now go directly to that; so we don’t need a new transporter-erector.
He added that they will proceed quickly in launching the present design of New Glenn, instead of upgrading to the proposed more powerful version, as some in the space community have speculated. He then said what I quote above: “We will fly again before the end of this year.”
While many in the space community appear skeptical of this possibility, I am not. Getting the launchpad rebuilt and workable again based on this report does not seem a gigantic challenge. If the Russians can rebuild their Soyuz pad in just over three months there is no doubt an American company with the financial and technical resources of Blue Origin can do as well if not better. Moreover, except for the replacing the strongback with a vertical mobile transporter, the rest of the work requires no redesign.
The big question however will be tracing the cause of the explosion and fixing that. But even here, I can’t see this taking more than seven months. I might have said so three years ago, before Limp took over from Blue Origin’s previous very bad CEO, but Limp has made a decided effort to quicken Blue Origin’s operational pace. I think he will make this happen.
I also think there is a potential very bright silver lining to this failure. If Limp does what he should, Blue Origin is going to recover from this incident a much better company. By forcing quick action, Limp is going to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff in his staffing, and weed out the bad eggs in the company.
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I, too, hope they can get back in the saddle this year. But it’s a lot more than just the strongback replacement. For example, if you see the new satellite overheads from Planet Lab’s SkySat C9 yesterday, you can see that big chunks of the pad platform collapsed into the flame trench:
https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/rocket-goes-boom-satellite-cameras-zoom-explosive-blue-origin-damage-is-visible-from-space
That will all have to be cleared, rebuilt, reported. Along with all subsurface piping and wiring.
Given how long it took SpaceX to rebuild its static fire pad at Massey’s, I guess I’m just keeping my expectations modest here. Spring or summer 2027. Hope they can beat it. But I won’t be blasting them if they don’t.
This may be overkill, but has this resulted in Blue Origin being “grounded” by the FAA?
No need, the FAA won’t get involved unless others are at risk.
I agree. Just a wouldn’t have been surprised by a grounding.
I like David’s last sentence in his interview: “Gradatim Ferociter.” Latin is easy, but rebuilding a pad in under a year is hard. At least the tank farm survived. That is going to be quite a schedule to get multiple contractors on-site with multiple launches.
Getting it done in under six months on short notice is a tall order. It will take at least a month to mobilize. There are rules on when you can work or not during launches at sites. I had to deal with no work 24 hours before or the day of launch at KSC. On the S.F. side, six hours before and two hours after.
I hope Blue Origin sticks to being this scrappy.
I’m firmly in the “I don’t believe it, but I’d be happy to be proven wrong” camp. Initial analysis was that the support tower was kaput, several of the fuel tanks were going to need heavy refurbishment at a minimum, and that the stored stages in the HIF had taken damage. Now apparently none of that is the case. I’m sure some of that is just the difference between armchair internet analysts looking at photos and making assumptions as opposed to actual engineers looking at the hardware on the ground, but surely there’s some optimism in there as well and they’re going to find stuff that they assumed they could repair that they’re going to have to replace instead, etc.
I don’t like the comparison the Russian pad repairs. The Russians didn’t have to rebuild much at all. Clean up the site, bring in the spare gantry from a previously decommissioned launch site, and replace some support structure. If they hadn’t had that spare gantry available, the site would still be months from being back in operation.
On the other hand, there’s no REAL reason Blue shouldn’t be able to rebuild that pad in a matter of months. Historically, we’ve built much larger and more complicated things in less time. But the America of the last couple decades seems to have thrown that capability away, and we’ve only just begun to even try and get it back, and Blue and it’s people seem to be mostly on the wrong side of that battle.
David Eastman: I think this debate really hinges on Blue Origin and David Limp. If the company can get this done fast, and Limp uses it to clean house and fix his staffing (as I hope), then Blue Origin will finally be positioned to really compete with SpaceX. If he can’t, and your pessimism is correct, then it won’t, and we will remain saddled with lack of competition in the American launch industry.
The most likely result will be somewhere in between, which to my mind will still be a step up.
BOB, You’re making the same misteak as a lot of US regulators have made in various industries over the years. SpaceX has competition, it just isn’t American. Launch services is an international market. The Russians, the Europeans, etc, etc will put oursatellite up for you, SpacX is just temporarily in the lead of a long race.
I’ll be atop the rocket when t explodes and sends me flying.
Eric Berger went and talked to several of the SpaceX senior employees who were involved in the cleanup/rebuild of SLC-40 after the 2016 AMOS-6 explosion, about how that went, and what it bodes for Blue Origin. The question of Dave Limp’s timeline came up:
“None of the former SpaceX employees I spoke with for this article—some on the record, some off—believe this timeline is realistic. Twelve months was generally viewed as the best-case scenario. Eighteen months was seen as most likely.”
https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/06/how-long-will-it-take-to-rebuild-blue-origins-launch-pad-we-asked-some-spacex-vets/
But the article does end on an upbeat note. They have a chance to build a much better pad out of this, just as SpaceX did.
Man, eighteen months would be an awful outcome. NASA would have to rely on SpaceX even more than it already does, along with the military, further cementing SpaceX’s dominance of the launch sector.
Yeah, aint it great?
The blast is supposed to have been equal to a one kiloton nuclear explosion. Of course, no radioactive biproducts to worry about…..I hope.
COL Beausabre,
As I can’t respond to your comment directly,
The thing is, Russia and China are legally blocked from Western launches. Europe just does not have the capacity and won’t for a long time. SpaceX launches more in a month than Ariane 5 did in any year, and will likely repeat the same for Ariane 6 for quite some time. The upcoming European providers like Isar, HyImpulse, PD, et al. are building much smaller vehicles that don’t directly compete with SpaceX the way Arianespace does. It’s going to be at least a couple of decades before we see real foreign competition.
Agreed. And there are additional considerations when addressing the long-term – which I think we can usefully define as anytime beyond the 2030s.
Neither Russia nor the PRC are likely to be around in anything except perhaps shrunken rump form in that timeframe. The Ukrainians are going to beat the Russians quite decisively in the current war. That could happen as soon as later this year and is virtually guaranteed to happen by the end of next year. Once that occurs, Putin will fall, his few credible successors will waste their efforts eliminating one another and a number of long-restive provinces will make their exits during the confusion. The PRC will grab off much of Siberia and NATO special ops troopies will swarm in and round up whatever remains of the Russian nuke stockpile that the PRC doesn’t get to first.
Between wartime destruction and post-war loss of territory, Russia will cease being a space power or even space-capable. Vostochny will likely go to the PRC. Baikonur is already on foreign territory and a penurious post-war Russia will have no way to pay the Kazakhs for further access. Plesetsk will either be taken by Finland or shared with its other Scandinavian NATO-member neighbors as part of likely territorial adjustments in Russia’s current northern marches. If not, it will simply be comprehensively destroyed to prevent its ever again being used as a missile base. The same will apply to all of Russia’s current considerable military assets on the Kola Peninsula including the entire Northern Fleet. The Pacific Fleet will fall to the PRC, whatever is left of the Baltic Fleet will also go to Scandinavia and the Germans and the Black Sea Fleet will have pretty much ceased to exist.
Ethnic Russians will be forcibly expelled from Siberia by the PRC. The same may well happen to ethnic Russians in every other bit of ex-Russian territory that decamps the Federation. The Balts may well choose to do likewise. Russia has always used “oppression” of ethnic Russians as an excuse to invade neighbors – including Ukraine. Even a rump European Russia with its nuclear fangs pulled may fall back into old habits, however enfeebled it is.
Should that happen – and between-World-Wars Germany offers a precedent – I suspect a coalition of the willing former colonies of the Russian Empire might elect to pre-emptively sack, loot and depopulate the place just to make sure it never rises to become troublesome again. The former colonies to the south and east would seem likeliest to entertain such a project. Should that eventuate, my advice to any future US President would be the same as James T. Kirk’s advice when informed the Klingons faced extinction – “Let them die!”
Russia, in any case, has a population aging nearly as rapidly as that of the equally-doomed PRC. Given its notably shorter life expectancy, Russia will fade rapidly in coming decades even if its much-historically-put-upon neighbors don’t decide to administer a quick coup de grace. What few young people remain after massive war losses will largely emigrate from the shrunken and decaying carcass of dying Mother Russia, disperse to other nations and their children will not really be Russian. The Russian ethnicity will be effectively extinct by century’s end and likely well before.
Dead nations launch no rockets – for themselves or anyone else.
The Han ethnicity in China is also demographically doomed to effective extinction by century’s end. Fully half of its current numbers will be gone by mid-century. The PRC, as a going nation-state concern, will implode much earlier. It is effectively bankrupt now and has an economy shrinking because its labor productivity is terrible, not improving and its total working-age population continues to shrink as the now-dominant oldsters age out of the workforce. The PRC may receive a stay of execution of sorts if it turns its hand, for awhile at least, to gobbling up much of Siberia and leaving Taiwan for later – not that there’s going to be a later.
Russia has been, in effect, selling Siberia to the PRC on the installment plan in order to continue its war in Ukraine. Once the Ukes finish off Russia, militarily, there won’t be much to keep the PRC from just walking in with their own “little green men” as Russia did in Ukraine in 2014 and taking over officially. Exploiting Siberia may allow the PRC to last longer than it otherwise would, but the Demographic Clock of Doom continues to tick and will have its way in the end.
There are, of course, other scenarios for a quicker end of the PRC. A successful coup against Xi – perhaps by the beleaguered PRC military – would certainly stir the pot. As Xi has carefully eliminated anyone who might form the nucleus of any sort of opposition, a post-Xi PRC won’t find itself with an abundance of potential successors capable of holding things together. The PRC could, rather swiftly, fracture into multiple warlord states in the interior and coastal trading states on the coast. These latter could secure protection for their modest borders from the US, the Japanese and perhaps even the Indians in return for suitable economic consideration. Fractious warlord states have actually been the norm during much of China’s long history.
Of course there are other, less happy scenarios for PRC dissolution. The worst of these is likely an exchange of nuclear warheads between Russia and the PRC as Russia is defeated by Ukraine but still retains some of its nuclear arsenal as the PRC moves on Siberia before it and NATO can scoop those nukes up. Such an exchange wouldn’t last long, but would likely make quite a mess of both nations – or former nations.
Or, against all reason, the PRC – still under Xi or not – might decide to have a go at Taiwan after all. That will go about as well for the PRC as the Ukraine War has gone for Russia, but the fatal damage to the PRC is likely to be inflicted much more quickly.
There are many possible – and plausible – roads to oblivion for the PRC. None of them involve it remaining a space power of any consequence for much longer.
The Europeans, for their part, will remain hamstrung by disunity and excessive bureaucracy even if the EU ultimately implodes as an institution. Most of Europe also faces a fairly dire demographic future. I simply don’t see it being in the cards for Europe to be more than a quite peripheral player in space beyond mid-century.
The only space long distance runner besides the US seems most likely to be India. As Russia and the PRC fade or implode and Japan also continues its long recessional into history, India will inherit the mantle of chief mover and shaker in all of Asia.