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New Glenn rocket explodes on launch pad during test

Spectacular explosion at Florida launch pad. (Credit: Spaceflight Now)
An explosion at Blue Origin’s launch pad lights up the skies over Florida. (Spaceflight Now Video)

Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket exploded today during a hotfire test on its launch pad in Florida — dealing heavy damage to the pad, and dealing a heavy blow to Jeff Bezos’ space venture.

“All personnel are accounted for and safe,” Bezos said in a post to X. “It’s too early to know the root cause but we’re already working to find it. Very rough day, but we’ll rebuild whatever needs rebuilding and get back to flying. It’s worth it.”

The U.S. Space Force confirmed that there were no injuries or fatalities. “Range officials, in coordination with Blue Origin and appropriate partners, are currently evaluating available data to determine the exact cause of the anomaly,” it said in a Facebook post. In a follow-up post to X, the Space Force’s Space Launch Delta 45 cautioned that debris from the anomaly could wash ashore over the coming days or weeks.

The 322-foot-tall rocket, nicknamed “No, It’s Necessary” in a reference to the movie “Interstellar,” had been due to send 48 Amazon Leo satellites into orbit as soon as next week. The Federal Aviation Administration gave its go-ahead for launch last week after Blue Origin wrapped up an investigation of a launch failure that occurred in April.

In preparation for liftoff, the New Glenn rocket was brought out to Blue Origin’s pad at Space Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station for a static test firing of its booster engines. The satellites were not aboard the rocket for the test.

Video showed the rocket exploding in a huge fireball after the engines were lit up. “They just nuked the pad,” one observer could be heard saying in a video recorded by Spaceflight Now. Other views of the blast were captured by NASASpaceflight.com.

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Blue Origin gets ready to launch Amazon Leo satellites

Two New Glenn rockets being processed at Blue Origin facility
New Glenn rockets are being processed inside Blue Origin’s Florida facility. (Blue Origin Photo)

Five weeks after experiencing its first launch failure, Kent, Wash.-based Blue Origin is getting ready to put its heavy-lift New Glenn rocket back in service to launch 48 satellites into low Earth orbit for the growing Amazon Leo constellation.

The mission, designated as NG-4 for the rocket and LN-01 for the payload, will mark the first time Blue Origin’s rockets have launched satellites for Amazon — forging a new connection between the two best-known companies founded by Jeff Bezos. It will also set a new high for the number of Leo broadband satellites launched on a single mission.

“Couldn’t be prouder to support the Leo team on this mission,” Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp said in a post to X. Before he joined Blue Origin in 2023, Limp was the Amazon executive in charge of the Amazon Leo program (when it was known as Project Kuiper).

This will be the fourth launch of a New Glenn rocket. The first-stage booster for NG-4 is nicknamed “No, It’s Necessary” — a line from the movie “Interstellar” that refers to the need for a bold space maneuver.

New Glenn had been grounded in the wake of last month’s unsuccessful launch of an AST SpaceMobile satellite from Florida. But last week, the Federal Aviation Administration said it accepted the findings of an investigation led by Blue Origin. The investigation said the mishap was caused by a cryogenic leak that froze a hydraulic line, leading to a thrust anomaly during the second-stage engine burn.

Blue Origin identified nine corrective actions to prevent a recurrence of the mishap, and the FAA authorized the return to flight. An FAA advisory suggested the launch could take place as early as next week.

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NASA chooses Blue Origin to deliver moon buggies

Illustration: Blue Origin Blue Moon lander with Astrolab rover on moon's surface
An artist’s conception shows Blue Origin’s Blue Moon Mark 1 lander lowering an Astrolab rover to the lunar surface. (NASA Illustration)

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture has won NASA’s nod to deliver crew-carrying rovers to the lunar surface as part of the space agency’s decade-long plan to create a base near the moon’s south pole.

“America is returning to the moon,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said today during a news briefing at the space agency’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. “We are working alongside our many international and commercial partners to leverage the incredible capabilities from commercial industry to build a moon base for all we hope to accomplish in this endeavor.”

NASA awarded Blue Origin an initial $188 million contract to get its robotic Blue Moon Mark 1 lander ready to deliver lunar terrain vehicles, or LTVs, with an option period worth an additional $280.4 million for two task orders. The option period will be based on Blue Origin’s performance during the initial contract phase, NASA said.

Carlos Garcia-Galan, program manager for NASA’s Moon Base program, said the LTVs will be “a mix between the Apollo lunar roving vehicle and the Mars-style rover.” Each rover will weigh a little less than one metric ton, he said, and will be folded up to fit on Blue Origin’s lander during transit to the moon.

The first LTV is due to be brought to the moon in advance of the Artemis 4 mission’s crewed landing, which is currently scheduled for 2028, Garcia-Galan said.

One of the LTVs will be built by California-based Astrolab, with Seattle-based Interlune serving as a subcontractor. In a LinkedIn post, Interlune said it would work with Astrolab on “many aspects of the rover development, involving the science of survival in the lunar environment.” The Interlune Research Lab in Texas will develop varieties of simulated moon dirt specifically for testing Astrolab’s moon rover, which has been designated CLV-1.

The other LTV will be Colorado-based Lunar Outpost’s Pegasus rover, which is being developed in partnership with General Motors, Goodyear and Leidos.

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Universe Today

Next-gen Starship passes its first flight test despite snags

Aerial view of Starship launch from Texas pad
SpaceX's Starship V3 rocket rises from its Texas launch pad. (SpaceX via X)

SpaceX’s next-generation Starship V3 rocket got off to a glorious start for its first test flight, and although not all of its engines fired fully according to plan, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said the mission “scored a goal for humanity.”

This was the 12th Starship launch, but the first one since SpaceX completed a thorough redesign of the rocket’s Super Heavy first-stage booster, the second stage (known as Ship), the Raptor rocket engines and the launch facilities at SpaceX’s Starbase in south Texas.

Super Heavy lit all 33 of its Raptor V3 engines at liftoff, and successfully sent Ship on its way over the Gulf of Mexico. But after stage separation, Super Heavy shut down its engines prematurely. As a result, the booster tumbled through the atmosphere to an uncontrolled but safe splashdown in the gulf.

SpaceX had planned for a controlled splashdown but hadn’t planned to recover the booster, so it was no great loss.

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Universe Today

Crypto investor plans to ride Starship around Mars

Chun Wang
Chun Wang works on his laptop with Earth looming outside the window of SpaceX's Dragon capsule. (Chun Wang / SpaceX via X / 2025)

Chinese-born cryptocurrency investor Chun Wang has become the latest deep-pocketed space enthusiast to set his sights on a trip around Mars. But first, he wants to take a ride around the moon on SpaceX’s Starship. And SpaceX is willing to work with him.

Wang shared his ambition today during a SpaceX webcast focusing on the first attempt to launch a next-generation Starship V3 rocket from SpaceX’s Starbase in Texas for a test flight. The launch attempt had to be called off due to technical difficulties with ground equipment, but SpaceX could try again as soon as May 22.

During a lull in the countdown, the webcast team cut to an interview with Wang, who was speaking from Bouvet Island, a rugged nature reserve in the South Atlantic Ocean that’s been called the world’s most remote island. It was an apt setting for a conversation about Wang’s out-of-this-world idea.

Wang already qualifies as a space traveler: Last year, he headed up a privately funded mission that sent him and three other crew members into polar orbit in a SpaceX Dragon capsule for three and a half days. Today, SpaceX launch commentator Dan Huot said Wang is already back in line to take on “the first interplanetary mission on a Starship,” even though the rocket is still in testing mode and hasn’t yet made a single orbit around Earth.

“It’s going to be a flyby mission of Mars,” Wang said. “A lot of people are talking about how Mars will be like: ‘We’re going to fly to Mars, we’re going to land on Mars, we’re going to build a city on Mars.’ But let’s get this started with a flyby. … It will light the fire. It will ignite the imagination, and it will build the momentum.”

No timetable was given for the mission, but SpaceX said the round trip would take two years. Wang wasn’t worried about getting bored during the cruise to and from the Red Planet. “This is actually my style of fireworks,” he said. “I can stare at the map view on airplanes all the way from takeoff to landing. So I think I will enjoy the trip.”

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GeekWire

Starfish sets sights on new target for satellite docking

Illustration: Otter Pup 2 satellite in orbit
An artist’s conception shows Starfish Space’s Otter Pup 2 satellite in orbit. (Starfish Space Illustration)

Eleven months after launch, Starfish Space’s Otter Pup 2 satellite is finally kicking its test mission into high gear, closing in for a rendezvous with a newly designated target.

If all goes according to plan, Otter Pup 2 will dock with Australia-based Gilmour Space’s ElaraSat satellite sometime in the next few months. ElaraSat became the new target after earlier plans to connect with a D-Orbit ION satellite were scrubbed for undisclosed reasons.

Trevor Bennett, one of the founders of Tukwila, Wash.-based Starfish Space, said ElaraSat was launched on the same SpaceX satellite rideshare mission that sent Otter Pup 2 into orbit last June. Gilmour Space was “more than willing and excited to jump on and do something a little bit ambitious and crazy with us,” he told me.

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Insiders share tales about Amazon Leo satellite network

Rajeev Badyal and Chris Weber onstage during luncheon
Rajeev Badyal, vice president of Amazon Leo, discusses plans for satellite broadband services while Chris Weber, Amazon Leo’s vice president of business and product, looks on during the Technology Alliance’s State of Technology Luncheon. (GeekWire Photo / Brian M. Westbrook)

Amazon Leo is still months away from the commercial launch of its satellite broadband network, but there’s already at least one satisfied user: Rajeev Badyal, who heads up the Amazon Leo team.

“I was in a remote location last week,” Badyal said today at the Technology Alliance’s annual State of Technology Luncheon in downtown Seattle. “I had the terminal with me. … I was in a place surrounded by mountains. I go, ‘There’s no way that we can make it here.’ The team said, ‘Just go put it there, we’ll take care of the rest.’ And they did it. It worked flawlessly.”

Badyal said he and his wife even streamed a movie in an isolated location where their phones couldn’t pick up a signal. “We were both like two kids who had never seen the internet before, discovering the internet for the first time,” he recalled.

For now, Badyal and other insiders are the only ones trying out Amazon Leo’s satellite service on a beta-testing basis, but it won’t be long before the first customers will be able to sign up.

Badyal, who leads the effort as vice president of Amazon Leo, can hardly wait. “That, to me, is the ultimate milestone,” he said. “That’s why all of us have been working on this — to get it out there, get it in the hands of the customers.”

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TerraByte creates ‘Earth Search Engine’ for satellite data

Screenshot of TerraByte AI's Earth Search Engine
TerraByte’s software platform pinpoints cargo ships, warehouses, solar farms, mining sites and areas of deforestation. (Credit: TerraByte AI)

A stealthy Seattle startup called TerraByte AI is unveiling a software platform that uses artificial intelligence to sift through real-time satellite data for geospatial gems.

TerraByte’s “Earth Search Engine” analyzes streams of satellite imagery, recognizes features of interest and connects the dots through natural-language queries. The platform’s key advantage is that its data set doesn’t have to go through the laborious, expensive process of manual annotation.

“We’re just using self-supervised learning techniques to essentially understand the pixels without having to manually annotate it,” CEO and co-founder Rishi Madhok told me.

“There are many applications that you can do, like identifying power-line segments, finding parking lots near highways without EV charging stalls, watching container ships entering port,” he explained. “If you want to monitor the Strait of Hormuz, you can use our models to do that. Deforestation areas, open-pit mining in Arizona — all of these are very different concepts, but our model is able to understand them because it’s a foundational model.”

TerraByte is laying out its approach this week in Huntsville, Ala., at an ESA-NASA workshop on AI models for Earth observation.

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Fiction Science Club

A late author’s last novel bridges far-flung ancient realms

Three Minoan women in a fresco from the Palace of Knossos
This reconstructed image of a fresco from the Palace of Knossos on the island of Crete shows three Minoan women with their hair in ponytails. “The Curve of the World” throws a spotlight on Minoan seafarers. (Credit: Carole Raddato, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

Long before Homer wrote the Odyssey, Minoan seafarers were plying the trade routes of the Mediterranean and spinning stories of adventure — but when it comes to imagination on an outlandish scale, the late science-fiction author Vonda N. McIntyre’s tale about a transoceanic Minoan odyssey just might have awed even Homer.

McIntyre finished the manuscript for her final book, “The Curve of the World,” less than two weeks before she died of pancreatic cancer in 2019. Since then, a team of writers and editors assembled by Clarion West — the Seattle-based literary nonprofit that McIntyre founded in 1971 — has been working to get the novel in shape for publication.

That work is now complete. The book has made its debut, and Clarion West is celebrating with a virtual book launch party on May 16. Update: You can replay the launch party on YouTube.

Nisi Shawl, an award-winning science-fiction and fantasy writer, admits to “fan-girling” during the editing process. “The sheer joy of the prose, the sensual array of delights that are offered, every bit of the way, the writing is just so pleasurable,” Shawl says in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast.

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Amazon Leo revs up work on satellite broadband network

Amazon Leo executive Chris Weber at Mission Operations Center, wearing black-and-krypton T-shirt
Chris Weber, vice president of business and product for Amazon Leo, takes part in coverage of a satellite launch. (Credit: United Launch Alliance)

REDMOND, Wash. — Chris Weber isn’t ready to say yet exactly when Amazon Leo will start letting individual customers sign up for satellite broadband service, but when it happens, he’ll have the right wardrobe for the debut.

During a recent interview at Amazon Leo’s Mission Operations Center in Redmond, Weber sported running shoes in a shade of purple with the Leo brand emblazoned on the back.

“It’s not purple, it’s krypton,” Weber, who came over from GitLab in 2024 to become Amazon Leo’s vice president of business and product, told me. “Krypton is the color when our thrusters fire in space, so we picked that. It was obviously available in the Amazon palette. … There’s a lot of meaning and thought that went into our brands, and we’re quite excited about that.”

It’s been a year since Amazon Leo, formerly known as Project Kuiper, began its multibillion-dollar campaign to send up thousands of satellites to provide broadband internet access across the globe. So far, 304 satellites have been deployed over the course of 11 launches — and Weber said the Amazon Leo team will be running twice as hard in the year ahead.

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