One month after a New Glenn rocket explosion damaged its Florida launch pad, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture has decided to shift its focus to a new concept for future launches.
“To return to flight this year, we’re not rebuilding the same pad,” Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp said in an online update. Instead, the company will move ahead with a plan that it already had been working on for Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s Launch Complex 36.
The concept of operations, or ConOps in rocket lingo, calls for a hybrid horizontal/vertical configuration for launch preparations. Blue Origin had already planned to employ the hybrid system for a second pad that’s currently in development for its super-sized 9×4 New Glenn rocket. Now the system will be used for the old pad as well as the new one, “creating a common ConOps across two pads,” Limp said.
In a post to X, Limp said the plan “has the added benefit of increasing our flight cadence.”
The explosion on May 28, which took place while Blue Origin was preparing its New Glenn rocket to launch 48 satellites for the Amazon Leo constellation, dealt a heavy blow to Blue Origin’s launch plans. The Federal Aviation Administration called a halt to launches until Blue Origin traced the cause of the blast and took corrective actions.
In today’s update, Limp said “early analysis points to the aft section of the first stage” as the source of the anomaly. He voiced confidence that the root cause would be found and fixed.
He said the blast destroyed the pad’s lightning tower, transporter-erector and hydraulic cylinders, “but we caught a lot of breaks, too, and intend to make the most of them.”
Limp reported that the launch complex’s Integration Facility, tank farm, vehicle access tower and water tower were all in good shape, and that reconstruction of the pad has started. Blue Origin has moved three New Glenn upper stages and a twice-flown booster nicknamed “Never Tell Me the Odds” out of the Integration Facility as part of the pad cleanup process, he said.
Blue Origin’s launch manifest includes missions aimed at sending an uncrewed Blue Moon Mark 1 lander to the lunar surface, putting a more advanced Mark 2 lander into Earth orbit for crewed testing during NASA’s Artemis 3 mission, and delivering several rovers to the moon. New Glenn is also in the lineup to launch satellites for Amazon Leo and AST SpaceMobile.
Limp said Blue Origin is “continuing to build vehicles at rate in our world-class manufacturing facilities, maintaining flight readiness, and preparing to come back stronger than before.”
“Our road to space doesn’t pause here. We will return to flight by the end of this year,” he wrote. “It’s worth it.”
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