“All personnel are accounted for and safe,” wrote Bezos in a post on X at 10:13 p.m. “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.”
“Sorry to see this, I hope you recover quickly,” read a sparing post by Elon Musk, boss of rival rocket company SpaceX.
“NASA has planned Artemis on a ‘success-oriented’ schedule. That's NASA speak for setting very ambitious target dates for various milestones,” said John Logsdon, professor emeritus at George Washington University and the founder and long-time director of the school’s Space Policy Institute, in an email to TIME. “This incident certainly throws a monkey wrench in the Artemis schedule, which was probably not achievable even before the explosion.”
In 2021, NASA tapped SpaceX to adapt the towering 150-ft. upper stage of its 407-ft Starship rocket to serve as the program’s lunar landing craft—a vehicle prosaically named the Human Landing System (HLS). The entire Starship program, however, is far behind schedule, with 12 launches of the rocket in the past three years—some successful, some not, none qualifying the giant machine as anywhere close to operational. The HLS upper stage, meantime, has not yet been fully designed or built. That’s a problem, since shortly before the rousingly successful April flight of Artemis II—during which four astronauts visited the lunar neighborhood for the first time in nearly 54 years—Isaacman announced that Artemis III would fly late next year, testing SpaceX’s HLS with a crew in low-Earth orbit. But if Starship’s first stage isn’t flight-worthy yet, its landing craft will never get off the ground.
“If the New Glenn booster is out of service for some months,” says Logsdon, “either the Artemis 3 schedule has to slip or NASA has to move ahead with sole dependence on the lander version of the SpaceX Starship. That option has its own problems. Starship is currently grounded after multiple problems on its last flight and the Starship lander version has never flown.”
“NASA's plans for a Moon base are heavily dependent on using the New Glenn booster,” says Logsdon. “This incident suggests that those plans at this point are basically an aspiration rather than being realistically achievable in the next few years.”
“We will work with our partners to support a thorough investigation of this anomaly, assess near-term mission impacts, and get back to launching rockets,” added Isaacman in his post. “We will provide information on any impacts to the Artemis and Moon Base programs as it becomes available.”
Yesterday’s accident called to mind nothing so much as the July 3, 1969 attempted launch of the old Soviet Union’s N1 moon rocket. Rivalling NASA’s Saturn 5 in height and thrust, the N1 had nowhere near the Saturn’s reliability. On the day of the launch it had barely cleared the gantry when it erupted in a titanic blast that wiped out both the rocket and launch pad. The accident effectively knocked the USSR out of the space race. Seventeen days later, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped on the moon. Blue Origin, SpaceX, and NASA have a lot more than 17 days to set things to rights—but they have a lot of work ahead of them too.
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