Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin and Amazon will face ongoing organizational and technical challenges in the coming months in their space race with Elon Musk’s SpaceX, following the recent explosion of a New Glenn rocket that damaged its launch pad.
Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin and Amazon will face ongoing organizational and technical challenges in the coming months in their space race with Elon Musk’s SpaceX, following the recent explosion of a New Glenn rocket that damaged its launch pad.
As Reuters writes, citing company and industry sources, this incident significantly disrupted all of Amazon’s satellite launch schedules for the near future, and, therefore, only strengthened SpaceX’s dominance.
According to people at the company familiar with the matter, the launch pad has been «virtually destroyed,» so engineers expect at least a six-month delay in the timing of future launches.
«It only took SpaceX a year after Starship also exploded on the launch pad, so Blue Origin can recover too. But it will take months to recover,» noted Antoine Grenier, partner and head of space consulting at Analysys Mason.
Recall that after the Falcon 9 explosion at the launch pad in 2016, SpaceX spent over a year repairing the damaged facility, although it managed to resume launches within 4.5 months by moving operations to another launch pad in Florida.
Amazon LEO was counting on the rapid pace of New Glenn launches to quickly deploy half of its constellation of more than 3,200 satellites by July 2026.
There is an option in which SpaceX itself will launch the competitor’s satellites into orbit, but its Falcon 9 rocket can anyway only place half as many Amazon LEO satellites in a single launch as New Glenn.
According to analysts, this means the need for a significant increase in the number of space missions.
In addition, Blue Origin’s rocket was also scheduled to launch the company’s first lunar lander this year, and a few days ago, NASA awarded the company a contract to deliver two lunar rovers ahead of the Artemis 4 mission in 2028.
However, as the publication writes, it remains to be seen how much this incident will harm Blue Origin’s long-term prospects and how much it will be beneficial for SpaceX, whose order book is full of its own Starlink satellite deployments, as well as commercial and government missions.
As dev.ua recently reported, Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin rocket exploded during testing in Florida. The incident occurred on the evening of May 28 local time during engine testing before the scheduled launch of Amazon Leo satellites.
