Blue Origin narrowing in on root cause of catastrophic rocket accident

Blue Origin has provided its first substantive update on the cause of the catastrophic loss of the New Glenn rocket and most of its launch pad infrastructure at Cape Canaveral, Florida, in May. The space company's chief executive, Dave Limp, confirmed that the problem started in one of the rocket's seven BE-4 engines during the hot-fire test of the rocket on May 28, 2026.

The anomaly originated at the main oxygen valve on one of the BE-4 engines, which was later confirmed by hardware recovery and inspections. Extensive component-level and engine hotfire tests have been conducted to understand the failure mode better and inform mitigations.

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