Rocket Report: Blue Origin explosion still making headlines; Impulse raises money

Welcome to Edition 8.44 of the Rocket Report! The news this week is decidedly weighted in favor of heavy-lift rockets, largely due to the fallout from last Thursday’s explosion of Blue Origin’s New Glenn on its launch pad in Florida. Blue Origin aims to resume launches at the badly damaged launch facility by the end of the year, but there’s good reason to be skeptical of this timeline. With New Glenn grounded, will Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos approach Elon Musk’s SpaceX to launch his Blue Moon lander to the lunar south pole? It sure sounds like NASA is pushing for that.

As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don’t want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Spaceport development moves forward in Canada. There’s been a lot of talk about the Canadian government’s recent commitment to invest in a sovereign launch capability. There was the announcement last year of a federal budget of 182.6 million Canadian dollars ($131 million) over three years to establish a sovereign launch program. In March, the government said it would lease a dedicated launch pad at a commercially developed spaceport in Nova Scotia for national defense purposes, committing 200 million Canadian dollars ($144 million) to the deal. The agreement is a boon for Maritime Launch Services, which is developing Spaceport Nova Scotia after years of slow progress at the coastal site, SpaceQ reports.

Keeping civil… The initial phases of development focus on civil works, with road construction, utility connections, and construction of a “central hub” that will connect key commodities to the spaceport’s launch pads. Design work on the spaceport’s first launch vehicle integration facility should be complete in July, with construction tendering to start before the end of August, according to Stephen Matier, the CEO of Maritime Launch Services.

Canada is spending serious money on developing its own access to space, with federal grants awarded to three Canadian launch startups, and now an agreement to bankroll construction at Spaceport Nova Scotia. But Canada has a long path ahead. The nation has little experience in the launch sector, and it’s hard not to wonder if there’s any significant private investment that will follow the government’s sizable financial commitment in this area. (submitted by JoeyS-IVB)

A new Chinese rocket designed for reuse. The race to field China’s first reusable launch vehicle is far less predictable than a similar competition that played out in the United States a decade ago. A new rocket entered the field Monday with the first successful launch of China’s Long March 12B rocket, Ars reports. Engineers did not attempt to recover the Long March 12B’s booster stage, but the rocket flew with grid fins and landing legs, and Chinese officials touted plans to eventually land and reuse the first stage. The Long March 12B’s debut follows China’s first two attempts to recover an orbital-class booster with the Zhuque-3 and Long March 12A rockets in December. Neither landed successfully, but both rockets reached orbit.

A new rocket (almost) every month… Another new Chinese rocket, the partially reusable Tianlong-3 developed by a company named Space Pioneer, failed on its first launch in April. Several more new rockets designed for booster reuse could fly later this year. The Long March 12B is the largest of China’s new crop of would-be reusable rockets. It was developed by China Commercial Rocket Co. Ltd., or CACL, an opaque business venture set up by China’s sprawling state-owned aerospace enterprise. According to Chinese state media reports, engineers designed and developed the Long March 12B in just 21 months. If the claim is true, it would be a remarkably fast timeline to progress from a clean sheet to an orbital flight.

Impulse Space’s wallet just got a lot heavier. On Tuesday, Impulse Space, a company dedicated to improving space mobility, announced it has raised $500 million in Series D funding, Ars reports. Since it was founded five years ago by SpaceX veteran Tom Mueller, the company has now raised more than $1 billion. “Timing is everything,” Mueller said in an interview about the new round of funding. By this, he means the company has found its way into many markets. The company has already flown three missions with a small spacecraft, Mira, which was first launched in 2023 with a novel propulsion system powered by non-toxic propellants, nitrous oxide and ethane.

Lots to do... Impulse has more customers lined up. After the company announced its much larger “Helios” kick stage, demand from commercial customers was higher than anticipated. The US Space Force has become increasingly interested in satellite mobility, and now Impulse Space also believes it can provide landing services in the “1-ton-class” to NASA for its new Moon Base initiative.

Amazon is running out of Atlas Vs. United Launch Alliance overcame adverse weather conditions to launch a batch of Amazon Leo’s broadband internet satellites on its Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on May 29, Spaceflight Now reports. This was the seventh batch of production satellites that ULA launched on behalf of Amazon and the penultimate mission for the tech giant using an Atlas V rocket. There were 29 satellites aboard the Atlas V.

One more to go... Amazon purchased a total of 47 launches from ULA: 38 Vulcan rockets and nine Atlas V rockets. Amazon has now used eight of those Atlas Vs and none of the Vulcans, which are grounded after a solid rocket booster anomaly on a US Space Force mission in February. In all, Amazon purchased more than 100 rockets to launch more than 3,200 satellites for its first-generation constellation. The two rockets Amazon intends to use most—ULA’s Vulcan and Blue Origin’s New Glenn—are currently unavailable.

Blue Origin strives for a quick comeback. The chief executive of Blue Origin, whose large New Glenn rocket exploded spectacularly less than a week ago at the company’s launch site in Florida, vowed Monday night that the company would launch again before the end of 2026, Ars reports. Writing on the social media site X, Blue Origin’s Dave Limp said the company had been able to complete a preliminary survey of the LC-36A launch site. “Now that we’ve had access to the pad and integration facility, we can share a bit of good news,” Limp said. “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.”

Taking inventory... Limp also confirmed that the company would press ahead with a rebuild of the LC-36A site, which is designed for the 7×2 variant of the New Glenn rocket. One option had been to focus on building a larger pad next door, at LC-36B, capable of supporting the larger 9×4 variant of the rocket (the nine and four, respectively, refer to the number of engines in the first and second stage of the rocket). Notably, Limp also said Blue Origin had a plan to replace the massive transporter-erector that moves the New Glenn rocket from its nearby integration hangar out to the launch pad. This was damaged beyond repair during the test failure on Thursday, May 28.

Rebuilding a launch pad takes time. Fortunately, or unfortunately, there’s at least one other launch pad explosion we can use for comparison to Blue Origin’s accident at LC-36. Nearly 10 years ago, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket exploded on a launch pad a few miles north of where Blue Origin’s rocket went up in flames last week. The Falcon 9 explosion was somewhat less powerful, but some of the parallels between these two spectacular explosions were uncanny, Ars reports.

Been there, done that… To better understand the challenges Blue Origin now faces, Ars spoke with several SpaceX veterans who experienced the Falcon 9 failure in 2016 and worked the long days afterward to get the rocket flying and rebuild the shattered facility at Space Launch Complex-40. Blue Origin’s CEO, Dave Limp, has said the company will launch from its damaged pad by the end of the year, less than seven months from now. None of the former SpaceX employees Ars spoke with—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.

Blue’s explosion key to understanding methane. Last week’s explosion of a New Glenn rocket at Cape Canaveral, Florida, was clearly a setback for Blue Origin and NASA, but it was a learning experience for safety officials looking to open up the spaceport to hundreds more launches per year, Ars reports. Most of the rockets that will launch from Cape Canaveral in the 2030s will be fueled by methane or liquified natural gas and liquid oxygen. The US Space Force, which runs the spaceport, maintains strict rules for methane/liquid oxygen, or methalox, rockets because there is little data on how the combustible fluids might ignite in an accident. Comparatively, kerosene and hydrogen are known quantities.

A real blast… For now, military officials are treating any methalox rocket with “100 percent TNT blast equivalency” and maintaining wide keep-out zones around their launch pads when the rockets are loaded with propellant. Their intention is to ensure the safety of the public and workers at the spaceport. With more data on how methane-fueled rockets explode, officials expect the keep-out zones to get smaller over time. To that end, NASA, the Space Force, and SpaceX have conducted subscale ground tests to gather measurements on methane’s explosive yield. With last week’s New Glenn failure, engineers have real-world data on the blast wave and overpressure generated by the most powerful explosion in the history of Cape Canaveral.

NASA chief urges new ride for Blue Moon. Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket was supposed to launch the company’s first lunar lander, Blue Moon Mark 1, sometime this fall. The Blue Moon test mission is an important precursor for Blue Origin’s future human-rated Moon lander for the Artemis program, and NASA is eager to see it fly. The rocket’s explosion on the launch pad last week makes a launch on New Glenn this year unachievable. NASA now wants to find an alternative launcher for the first of Blue Origin’s Blue Moon demo missions, Spaceflight Now reports. In an interview with Fox Business on Thursday, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman described a “whole of government response” to the May 28 incident with the New Glenn. “We are also decoupling the lander from the launch vehicle and the pad itself,” he said.

Only one option... “NASA is laser focused on the lander because we’re laser focused on our mission to return astronauts to the surface of the Moon before 2028, and we’re going be able to keep that lander in development, progressing, so it’s available for our test mission in 2027, which is Artemis III, and potentially available to meet our landing objectives in 2028,” Isaacman said.

A NASA spokesperson confirmed to Spaceflight Now that NASA would like to see the launches of the Blue Moon Mark 1 cargo lander and potentially the Blue Moon Mark 2 crewed lander move to a rocket that’s not New Glenn. For Mark 1, at least, the only realistic option is SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket, but there are several technical hurdles to making that happen.

Artemis III booster segments shipped to KSC. While there is some uncertainty regarding timelines and landers, the rocket for the Artemis III mission is being prepared for launch from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Northrop Grumman began shipping all of the remaining solid rocket booster segments for the mission’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket from Utah on Tuesday, June 2, NASASpaceflight reports. The Union Pacific train will deliver the eight remaining booster segments to Kennedy, joining other booster components previously shipped to the Florida launch site.