By Joey Roulette
WASHINGTON, Aug 5 (Reuters) – A massive explosion of Blue Origin’s centerpiece New Glenn rocket in May was triggered by an issue with one of the rocket’s seven BE-4 engines, the company’s CEO said on Wednesday, as it races to return the vehicle to flight later this year.
“The anomaly originated at the main oxygen valve on one of the BE-4 engines, which was later confirmed by hardware recovery and inspections,” Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp wrote on X. “The path forward is clear. We’re making small modifications to the valve that can be quickly retrofitted to existing engines.”
Two of the Blue Origin-made BE-4 engines are also used on each Vulcan rocket owned by United Launch Alliance, the Boeing-Lockheed Martin joint rocket venture, which has said it is collaborating with Blue Origin on its investigation. ULA did not immediately return a request for comment.
New Glenn exploded on its Florida launchpad in May days before its fourth flight, sending shockwaves across the Cape Canaveral, Florida, coast and damaging some launchpad infrastructure known to take years to build.
Limp has since overseen an urgent and complex technical investigation into the explosion, pushing Blue Origin staff to quickly return New Glenn to flight by year’s end.
To do so, the Jeff Bezos-owned company is forgoing a replacement of a large rocket transporter tower that was damaged by the explosion and instead opting to change the process in which it integrates payloads onto the rocket in the future, Limp has said.
Blue Origin has planned to use New Glenn to launch its Blue Moon lunar lander for NASA as soon as next year in a crewed test mission in Earth’s orbit involving two other spacecraft in its Artemis lunar program.
Bezos-founded Amazon has spent billions of dollars in launch bookings for both New Glenn and Vulcan to loft its LEO broadband satellites into orbit in its bid to create a rival to SpaceX’s Starlink.
The explosion, which followed a mission failure on New Glenn’s third flight, added stress to a U.S. space industry facing a bottleneck in American rocket launch supply. Before the explosion, ULA’s Vulcan rocket had already been grounded by an issue involving its solid rocket motors.
(Reporting by Joey Roulette; Editing by Mark Porter, Nick Zieminski and Jamie Freed)
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