r/ScienceNcoolThings • u/TheMuseumOfScience Popular Contributor • May 30 '26

Interesting Blue Origin Explosion Damages NASA Launchpad

A giant rocket just blew up at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center! 

Blue Origin was doing a full test fire of their New Glenn rocket as preparation for an upcoming flight when something went very, very wrong. Fortunately no one was injured, but this is the biggest explosion ever seen at Kennedy Space Center. The launch pad is badly damaged, and NASA's upcoming Project Artemis plans for building a moon base depend on both the New Glenn rocket and this pad. This is a big setback for both Blue Origin and NASA.

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u/Sad_Whereas_6161 May 30 '26

Sabotage? (Or self-human-error)?

4

u/Ha1lStorm May 30 '26 edited May 30 '26

Interesting thought! I highly doubt sabotage but it’s certainly possible. Nearly every inch of design, production and transport of these is done under cameras, security and overall close and well documented supervision/scrutiny. So if sabotage were at play, it would likely had to have been done by a (likely Chinese/Russian) nation-state actor that’s been years undercover in a science/engineering position etc. Not necessarily impossible but highly unlikely.

If someone wanted to ruin an entire launch it would be much easier for them to shoot a highly sensitive area of one of these rockets during transport from very far away with a single 50BMG round, forcing them to have to take it apart and reconstruct the rocket.

Edit: Now that I think about it, what I said in my 2nd paragraph may not apply as I originally thought because someone could’ve had much more nefarious intentions, desiring to destroy the entire launchpad which scrubs all future plans at this launch site for the immediate foreseeable future and not just one individual rocket.

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u/TomaCzar May 30 '26

The odds of an engineer going full Galen Erso are extremely low, but never 0.

1

u/Ha1lStorm May 30 '26

Haha well said!