By now, you’ve probably seen the unbelievable video of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket exploding on its launchpad in Florida on Thursday night. On its face, Blue Origin’s pain would seem to be Elon Musk’s gain, further cementing SpaceX’s already significant lead in the space business just weeks before it goes public. While the explosion is obviously terrible news for Jeff Bezos’ space ambitions, Musk and his SpaceX colleagues have been sending their condolences instead of celebrating Blue Origin’s misfortune—for good reason. To be sure, SpaceX will benefit from the disaster in the immediate term. The explosion, which occurred during a rocket engine test, obliterated Blue Origin's only launch site for New Glenn, which will probably take around a year and many tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to rebuild. It’s unlikely Blue Origin will be able to launch New Glenn again until at least next spring.
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By now, you’ve probably seen the unbelievable video of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket exploding on its launchpad in Florida on Thursday night. On its face, Blue Origin’s pain would seem to be Elon Musk’s gain, further cementing SpaceX’s already significant lead in the space business just weeks before it goes public. While the explosion is obviously terrible news for Jeff Bezos’ space ambitions, Musk and his SpaceX colleagues have been sending their condolences instead of celebrating Blue Origin’s misfortune—for good reason.
To be sure, SpaceX will benefit from the disaster in the immediate term. The explosion, which occurred during a rocket engine test, obliterated Blue Origin's only launch site for New Glenn, which will probably take around a year and many tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to rebuild. It’s unlikely Blue Origin will be able to launch New Glenn again until at least next spring.
NASA, which has a series of ambitious moon missions planned in the coming years, had been planning to split duties between SpaceX and Blue Origin. Now it seems almost certain that the agency will have to rely more heavily on SpaceX or delay its plans to give Blue Origin even more time to catch up.
New Glenn’s delay is also terrible news for a variety of SpaceX competitors. The next launch of the Blue Origin rocket was supposed to put 48 satellites into orbit for Leo, Amazon’s yet-to-launch Starlink competitor. After that, New Glenn was supposed to launch more satellites for AST SpaceMobile, another yet-to-launch Starlink competitor. While those would-be satellite internet providers have alternatives, including paying SpaceX or others to launch their satellites, New Glenn’s explosion helps relieve some near-term pressure on Starlink, which accounted for the majority of SpaceX’s revenue last year.
What’s more, the explosion could complicate Blue Origin’s ability to raise outside funding to supercharge its expansion. So far, the venture’s only investor has been Bezos, but the Financial Times reported in March that Blue Origin was considering raising outside money for the first time.
So why isn’t Musk—who has a decadeslong history of taunting Bezos—kicking his archrival while it’s down? Just look at the stock market, which seemed to remember on Friday the perils of space flight. Rocket Lab and Firefly Aerospace, two publicly traded rocket makers that could theoretically benefit from Blue Origin’s problems, saw their shares close down 3%and6%,respectively. Any space mishap can remind investors of the risks inherent to anyone trying to blast gigantic rockets into orbit, hurting their belief in the entire sector.
Plus, SpaceX has been in Blue Origin’s position before. In 2016, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket blew up during an engine test on a launch pad in Florida, putting the site out of commission for 15 months. Given SpaceX’s huge ambitions, the company’s spacecraft will almost certainly spectacularly fail again at some point in the future when it’s publicly traded. When that happens, Musk will have to hope that his investors and competitors give him a measure of grace.
In Other News
• Prediction market Kalshi won approval from U.S. regulators to offer crypto trading through bitcoin perpetuals, a type of highly-leveraged derivatives product. Coinbase also got the greenlight to connect its U.S. users to trade crypto perpetual futures and options globally.
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