Ouch, losing the rocket is unfortunate, but the damage to the launch infrastructure is going to easily mean over a year of repairs. I hope they're going to take this as an opportunity to update the infrastructure from lessons learned from the flights so far, and to be able to support some of their future ambitions (e.g. Jarvis).
It's an understandable but wrong attitude. If you don't have high profile failures like this, you aren't taking enough R&D risk. It's a fiercely ambitious industry and these launch attempts amount to what literally are moon shots. The race is on between various companies and countries as to who gets there first.
Boeing is pretty much out of the race at this point. Just too busy navel gazing and lobbying. There's a big risk that the next person on the moon might be from China. Blue Origin and SpaceX are the best things to happen to the rocket industry in decades. So, yes Blue Origin had a RUD with New Glenn. They should, learn and adapt and launch the next one. It would be good for SpaceX to have credible competition. And New Glenn seems like it could become that.
But if they only get their lessons every few years, they'll be competing against a fully reusable Starship rather than Falcon 9 & Falcon heavy by the time this thing becomes a serious launch vehicle. The goal posts are moving.
High profile failures that take out launch infrastructure are undesirable because the cost to that is much much higher than just losing the rocket. It means having all of your R&D and production pipelines stalled for at least months, usually years, while the rest of that fiercely ambitious industry races ahead.
This was routine pre-launch testing, not a launch attempt.
My understanding is that a static fire test is not much different than a launch attempt? The tanks are fully loaded. The engines are throttling up to full.
In terms of application its the same amount of energy going into the rocket in either case.
What I was trying to imply is that it wasn't R&D. That it was routine testing, verifying that your machine is working fine.
Static fires put more stress on the rocket than an actual launch because the rocket is stuck on the ground, receiving all the shockwaves. They also cause more damage to the launch infrastructure.
They might purposely NOT fully fuel one of the 2 tanks, in case this happens...
Forgive my ignorance, but why would China being the next on the moon be such a bad thing? Aren't moon missions mostly just "look what I can do!" sorts of things?
For decades, Americans have been propagandized into the position that they alone are exceptional. Thus, anyone that challenges that belief becomes the enemy. It's gotten so bad, that "China might get there first" is the only way to get American politicians to actually stick to a target for more than 4 years.
Depends on your point of view. But I imagine some people in the US would not be happy to lose that race. The reason it was a race in the sixties is because they definitely didn't want the Russians to get there first.
So purely so that China doesn't get the bragging rights? I guess I don't see the big deal but I'm sure it's more important than it seems on the surface.
Some of that, and also because it’s a benchmark of program maturity. Think of it as not wanting China to be able to do things the US can’t, with some overtones of military capability, American exceptionalism, the symbolism of China not even being in the race that the US won 56 years ago, etc.
China harvests muslims organs and converts mosques to toilets. And some may be okay with it but it's a complete opposite to freedom of religion
USA does bad things too.
Any human space exploration is good. If it's a usa or a China rocket, landing on the moon, with humans in it, and safely returning, it's good.
China isn't looking at it just for bragging rights, but as a step towards the first moon base. Some see it as a race for the frontier and territorial claims.
Are you saying that Americans, who have close to 1,000 known and many unknown bases in every corner of the globe are worried someone else might set up a base somewhere before them?
I guess I am just not that bothered, because I don't assume American intentions are inherently better.
That's easy to say if you aren't the one getting space junk dumped on you when a rocket explodes.
Nah, failures that destroy the launch pad are just bad, any way you try to slice it.
Is there any reason to doubt that the Chinese will get (back) there first?
Sure. It’s not easy to do. I think odds favor China right now, but it’s far from a done deal. Anything from geopolitics to internal politics to technical hurdles could interfere (ditto with the US and everyone else of course).
Not first. Seventh.
The successful manned moon landings so far:
1. United States of America
2. United States of America
3. United States of America
4. United States of America
5. United States of America
6. United States of America
Now we're watching a riveting race for 7th place.
There was no race anymore once the first Moon landing happened. Same as the Soviets won the 'space race' since they were the first to get into space.
The Moon landing race was a new race.
Now the Back to the Moon race is a different one altogether.
Boeing issue was that they in fact took the risks so that they move faster and cheaper.
> There's a big risk that the next person on the moon might be from China.
China seems to be focused more on pragmatic things and less on super expensive vanity projects.
They have a pretty concrete moon program. That would be one of the things they are focusing on.
I don't see China as being in a race though. They seem willing to play a long game in a lot of areas.
What were the high profile failures in the Apollo program that proves your point?
Apollo 1. Three astronauts died.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1
Not to mention there being a lot of launch failures pre and during the Apollo era, including pad explosions (there are nice compilations on youtube). But that was not really that much of an issue, as this was expected and there were dozens of pads built for these launches, so the testing cadence was not affected.
There was no fatal launch failure for Apollo & pad explosion would be a problem with just 2 pads available.
There were a couple Saturn V stage explosions during testing but again - those damaged test stands, not the pad.
Eric Berger of Ars Technica:
> I'm hearing that it is possible that Blue Origin decides to go directly to the larger 9x4 variant of New Glenn after this failure. Obviously no decisions like that will be made without more data review.
https://xcancel.com/SciGuySpace/status/2060190522539401631#m
This is their only New Glenn launch pad, but the pad for the 9x4 is already under construction. Depending on the damage sustained to the pad that might be a factor in the decision
I know it's not, but darned if that doesn't sound like "it exploded real big, so build a bigger one!"
It makes some sense. If they're not going to be able to launch for a year because the pad is being rebuilt anyway, projects that were going to take a year may as well go to the front burner.
> I know it's not, but darned if that doesn't sound like "it exploded real big, so build a bigger one!"
To me it sounds like "alright, it's silly to waste time and energy on duplicate effort. Let's focus on getting this one right instead."
https://x.com/sawyermerritt/status/2060174287563116696?s=46&...
That is a very fair point. While I have no skin in the game, it is fascinating to see if the Us with Artemus or China with Chang'e will be the first to make it back to the Moon manned.
At this point is is looking like the winners will merely be those that have the least loses and launch pad loses can take a long time to recover from.
Credit to Space X, they have become very good and fixing launch pads with Starship. What used to be year(s) long pauses, now only take a few months.
> the winners will merely be those
The best outcome is we get two Moon bases. I say this as someone who remains a fairly patriotic American. But we need competition and, more darkly, we need a backup.
The South Pole of the moon will end up one giant mega city due to it's constant sunlight. It will be a lot easier to get there once there is even one landing strip.
> landing strip
Why are landing strips the big unlock? Blast effects? Tiny landing legs?
You could land at 500 km/h on wheels and use breaks to stop. This makes it much safer and lowers how much propellant you need to bring to the moon by a lot. Similarly it makes getting back into lunar orbit much safer and easier because you can use electric motors to propel a craft to around 500 km/h before ditching the wheels and starting your chemical rockets. This lowers your propellant mass by 30%.
Also the landing strip can be designed to slowly go up hill which could help with the breaking phase as well.
> you can use electric motors to propel a craft to around 500 km/h before ditching the wheels and starting your chemical rockets.
Makes me wonder if you could accelerate to orbital velocity using something like a maglev train and not have to worry about rockets at all.
You can do that but it would require a track that is tens of kilometers long along with a magnetic levitation technology. My suggestion is something we can do right now with a basic landing strip. But yes a meglev is the end game. Needs to reach 8,570 km/h for moon orbital velocity.
You would have to do at least a circulization burn no matter the budget spent on maglev.
> lowers how much propellant you need to bring to the moon by a lot
Rough estimates? Mass drivers make sense. I haven’t seen the numbers for just compressing and leveling regolith.
I don’t know why we are wasting all this money making it habitable for humans when robotics have taken such strides the last few decades. Manned missions made sense when we didn’t have these compute and robotic abilities we have today. Now, they are undue risk and cost and offer no real functionality but some misplaced national pride perhaps.
Because it's better for Earth's biosphere to mine things like lithium on the moon rather than polluting our biosphere. The North and South pole of the moon also serves as an excellent staging ground to put solar energy collectors that can then transmit continuous concentrated power to Earth.
The moon is dangerous because there's no people and civilization is 5 days away at best but if there was already civilization at the moon you wouldn't think it was dangerous.
On top of that the materials on the moon are already "on the high ground" meaning you don't need to spend a lot of money on propellant to get it into orbit. So building space habitats and delivering them into an appropriate orbit on the moon is a tiny fraction of the fuel needed from Earth. To put this into perspective the Apollo Lunar Module only needed 2.2 Tons of propellant to get the upper part of it back into orbit to meet up with the service module. 2.2 tons of propellant is basically nothing with the scales we are talking about.
On top of that if we could produce the propellant on the moon the costs and logistics and difficulty of all of this drop significantly.
So in short the best possible way to lower the risk, cost, and provide functionality is to establish civilization on the moon and get to the industrial age there as quickly as possible.
We're doing it regardless of what you naysayers will say about it because it's the right thing to do for a thousand different reasons. And we're doing the robot thing too. At the same time.
> when robotics have taken such strides the last few decades
One of those strides has been in characterising just how magnificent the human eye, mind and hand are at picking weird shit out of a background.
Talk to me about the Mars rover that was unable to digna small hole to sample.
One more very minor step towards making the human race meteor-proof.
Our biology precludes that. We are adapted to life on earth. Sad to say but we should be seeding tardigrades, not humans, if we care about sustaining earth life after earth is destroyed.
I kind of have a soft spot for the human race, I think it's worth the extra effort to try, at least.
I believe that's the inevitable outcome.
The Chinese will build a moon base, as a sign from the Chinese government to the Chinese people that China is capable of cutting-edge engineering and science (notably a demonstration to their own citizens - when was the last time you heard about the Chinese space stations outside China?).
America seems a bit shaky in their determination to actually build a moon base, though having Jared Isaacman as administrator gives hope. But regardless of whether America is currently on track, a successful Chinese moon base won't stay without answer
> when was the last time you heard about the Chinese space stations outside China?
Last year, when negative news of delayed astronaut return was all over American news, e.g. [1][2]. Apparently makes American astronauts onboard Boeing ship being stuck in space less embarrassing.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/04/science/space/china-space...
[2] https://edition.cnn.com/2025/11/05/china/china-shenzhou-20-a...
I will give you that. I will be more than happy to see both reach there in mutual success. I do fear the blow back of the more tribalistic folks that will see it as a threat rather than success.
Yes, in that sense SpaceX has really benefited from having the Starbase site. My understanding is that one of the reasons pad rebuilds take so long at the Cape is that they have to work around everyone else's schedule.
I think that if companies want to scale up rocket launches (and let's disregard the cost / environmental impact / etc for now), they also need to scale up launch sites, at the moment they seem like single points of failure.
I have only armchair amateur half a world away knowledge of this, but I want to believe all they need is an exhaust diffuser thingy and refueling capabilities; the former can probably be built cheap enough anywhere, the latter can be made portable.
(of course then you also have the challenge of assembling and loading a rocket, lmao. But a hub-and-spokes setup with VAB(s) and launch sites spread out around it like an airport could work. Bonus evil villain points if the launch sites are underground to contain explosions in case of failure.
(this post is just imagination / castles in the sky)
Any large rocket needs a water deluge system to prevent damage to the launch pad and reduce sound volume so echoes don’t damage the rocket. The amount of fuel required for these large rockets can’t really be portable. A Starship launch uses hundreds of methane truck tankers worth of fuel.
But it is cadence that drives SpaceX to have multiple launchpads plus specialized capabilities and orbital dynamics for F9.