Blue Origin explosion hits NASA timeline + Artemis III crew

[THEME MUSIC] JANE LINDHOLM: Hi. I’m Jane Lindholm, filling in for Flora and Ira. And you’re listening to Science Friday.

[ROCKET EXPLODING]

When Blue Origin’s New Glenn spacecraft exploded in an enormous fireball during a ground test a couple of weeks ago, it sent shockwaves not just through the air but through NASA’s timeline for the upcoming Artemis missions. While there’s never a good time for an explosion like that, it comes at an especially bad time for the Jeff Bezos rocket company, which was awarded a slew of NASA contracts just days before the incident to deliver rovers and drones to the moon.

It had also been expected to play a major role in the upcoming Artemis III and IV missions, but that’s now up in the air, depending on how soon Blue Origin can rebuild its only launchpad. And with NASA’s Artemis III crew announcement this week, we have a lot to talk about. So let’s get to it with Ken Chang, a science reporter for The New York Times, where he covers NASA and the solar system, and Brendan Byrne, space reporter for Central Florida Public Media. Ken, Brendan, welcome to Science Friday.

BRENDAN BYRNE: Thanks, Jane.

KENNETH CHANG: Thanks.

JANE LINDHOLM: Brendan, how big a deal was the explosion, in terms of NASA’s schedule? And what was it exactly that Blue Origin was supposed to deliver?

KENNETH CHANG: Sure, yeah. So this was a blow to the schedule, as you mentioned. It was a huge, huge event here in Florida, miles away from the launch pad. We could see it. We could feel it. You could hear it. And, really, this was supposed to be a critical flight of New Glenn, which NASA is going to be relying on Blue Origin to use to get a lot of these landers and all of this equipment that it wants to get to the moon for its moon base.

So as you mentioned at the start, yeah, this is very bad timing, which certainly could have some impact on the schedule. It’s not just the rocket that they lost. It’s the launch pad itself. It’s the only launch pad that Blue Origin has for New Glenn. And launch pads are almost as complex as the rockets themselves. Now, Blue Origin came out and said that damage wasn’t as bad as they thought, and they were going to be able to get back to flying by the end of this year.

NASA seems confident that that will happen and they will get to the bottom of it. But you have to be a little bit skeptical when you saw that big boom in some of the pictures that you see coming back from the pad.

JANE LINDHOLM: Ken, NASA called Artemis III one of its most complex missions. What is the mission?

KENNETH CHANG: So when Jared Isaacman sort of revamped the moon program, he added this mission, which was not going to go to moon, it’s going to stay in Earth orbit. And SpaceX will have its Starship rocket, and Blue Origin will have its Blue Moon lander. Blue Moon will launch first, then the NASA astronauts in the Orion capsule. And they’re going to rendezvous in Earth orbit, practice docking. And they’re going to actually go into the lander and basically show that they can do these things all correctly the first time when they’re at the moon.

And then after they’re done with Blue Origin, then Starship is going to launch, and they’re going to do docking with Starship as well. So this is complex because you have three different spacecraft and three different mission controls. There will be NASA’s, SpaceX, and Blue Origin, which hasn’t happened before, really.

JANE LINDHOLM: It sounds like it’s almost like a docking competition.

KENNETH CHANG: Well, it almost is a bake-off, right? NASA is trying to decide which lander would be ready for Artemis IV, the first moon landing. And at this point, it looks more likely it will be SpaceX, given all the troubles that Brendan has described that Blue Origin is now facing in recovering from that explosion. But it’s still–

JANE LINDHOLM: But SpaceX has had explosions too. I mean, nobody’s apparently immune to explosions.

KENNETH CHANG: No, and this has sort of been overlooked. SpaceX has actually grounded right now with Starship. They had a mostly successful launch, but the booster crashed when it was trying to come back. And the FAA is requiring SpaceX to investigate and come up with a report so that they understand well enough to make sure that that doesn’t come down on people.

JANE LINDHOLM: So, in that case, it sounds like nobody’s ready. Why doesn’t NASA delay things?

KENNETH CHANG: Well, they’re almost facing an artificial deadline, which is the end of 2028. And they want to get this off the ground while President Trump is still President Trump. And then you start working backwards. And if you have any hope of doing a moon landing in 2028, you have to do Artemis III in 2027.

JANE LINDHOLM: I see. Well, so assuming that they’re moving forward and pushing this pace, Brendan, NASA announced the Artemis III crew. Who’s in the crew that is going to go if this goes?

BRENDAN BYRNE: So the crew is three spaceflight veterans and one rookie. So it is being commanded by NASA’s Randy Bresnik. He’s flown to space twice. His pilot is coming from the European Space Agency from Italy, Luca Parmitano. He had a very scary moment during a spacewalk in his last time at the International Space Station. His helmet filled up with water, and he ran the risk of potentially drowning in space, which is absolutely terrifying, but was able to get back into the hatch and fix all that.

Frank Rubio is from NASA as the mission specialist. He also ran into an issue last time he was in space. He flew up on a Russian Soyuz capsule that sprung a leak, so they had to send up a new craft to bring him home, which left him in space for 371 days, setting the American spaceflight record. And then Andre Douglas is the rookie flying as the other mission specialist, but he was the backup crew to Artemis II. So he’s very, very familiar with this program.

JANE LINDHOLM: You both operate in space circles, so you hear a lot of chatter about things like this. I don’t. And the one thing that I keep hearing from people who have any awareness of the Artemis III crew announcement is, where are the women? There’s been so much excitement about women in space and, pointedly, no women on this crew. Ken, was there a reason for that? Is there something that can be read into that or not?

KENNETH CHANG: So Jared Isaacman said, there’s nothing to read into it. It’s just that’s the way it happened to turn out in this case. It was very noticeable. I went back quickly to see when’s the last time this happened. There were four men on the SpaceX Crew-6 mission to the Space Station. But for all the other crew missions in recent years, there’s been at least one woman.

BRENDAN BYRNE: NASA was really vocal about sending the first woman and first person of color to the moon. And that since has been scrubbed from all of the NASA websites, presumably with the Trump administration’s crackdown on DEI. Some of the people that I’ve talked to, they’re just hoping that they’re saving all the women for the next flight, which will take humans to the moon, and have a woman on that ground team that gets there.

JANE LINDHOLM: Well, let’s move ahead to Artemis IV. What can we expect to happen, Brendan?

BRENDAN BYRNE: Boy, we don’t know.

[LAUGHTER]

I think we have to find out what happens with Artemis III first, right? Artemis IV is going to take humans to the surface of the moon. It’s the first time since the final Apollo mission in 1972. But we don’t know which lander is going to take them there. So really, Artemis IV is reliant on the success and what NASA learns from Artemis III.

JANE LINDHOLM: One of the reasons that we haven’t talked as much about for pushing this pace is not only the Trump administration, but definitely trying to beat other people who are trying to do some of this stuff before the United States. So, Ken, can you just explain, really basically, why the US feels so much urgency to land on the moon before the Chinese do.

KENNETH CHANG: Part of it is just national pride. This is something that is the greatest accomplishment in technology of the ’60s, right? There was a huge space race, and the United States won. And the US has been working on this return to the moon program for more than two decades. And it just sort of putters along. And now that there’s someone else catching up, all of a sudden, there’s this urgency that we have to be there before the Chinese.

Then there’s this fuzzier notion that who gets there first gets to dictate the rules of how you do business on the moon or who sets the standards of the radio communications or how you navigate and so on. And there’s a lot of people in Congress who say, we don’t want China to be the people who do that. And then there’s the third notion that there’s money to be made there, and if there’s money to be made, the US should be the ones being there first.

JANE LINDHOLM: Both countries want to build moon bases at the south pole, right?

KENNETH CHANG: Yes.

JANE LINDHOLM: And what would that actually look like?

KENNETH CHANG: We wish we knew.

[LAUGHTER]

China’s been talking about this collaboration with Russia. It’s an international moon base. We’ve seen maybe a couple paintings of it. It’s hard to tell what they have planned. The US, until a couple of months ago, really hadn’t talked about anything about how they were going to build a moon base. Now they have pretty pictures as well.

But even Jared Isaacman says, initially, it’s going to look more like a junkyard rather than this nice settlement. Because it’s going to be these rovers, these little other landers. And then further down, then once they’ve learned some things, then they’ll start coming up with a more coherent design.

BRENDAN BYRNE: And that early junkyard that NASA wants to make, as Ken so eloquently put, it was reliant on a specific lunar lander from a commercial space company called Blue Origin, which is grounded at the moment as well. So that certainly delays the start of that moon base.

JANE LINDHOLM: Ken, you’ve been covering the Artemis missions for a long time. These missions have been discussed and planned for years and years. There was the success of Artemis II. We’ve just had the crew announcement for Artemis III. Does this moment feel different in some way than what we’ve seen in years previously?

KENNETH CHANG: I got dumped on the NASA beat back in 2009, and that was when President Obama had just entered the White House. And his first year, he had appointed a commission to review the Constellation program, which was the last time that NASA tried to return to the moon. And that was basically a long-extended effort to cancel that. And so my experience covering NASA is mostly not going anywhere. And so it’s exciting that they actually got Artemis off the ground, around the moon, and back. So it’s gotten further than anything, in terms of going somewhere beyond low Earth orbit since 1972.

How far it will go beyond that is hard to tell. Because if you looked at the comments on a lot of my stories, half the people were really excited about Artemis. The other half were saying we should be spending more money on health care. This is just a playground of billionaires. And that’s sort of sentiment that sank Apollo back in the ’70s. And is it going to persist this time? It’s hard to tell still.

JANE LINDHOLM: Well, it’s all very interesting. And I’m looking forward to seeing what happens and really appreciate both of you helping us start to envision it. Thank you very much for taking the time.

KENNETH CHANG: Thank you very much.

BRENDAN BYRNE: Thank you.

JANE LINDHOLM: Kenneth Chang is a sports reporter for The New York Times, and Brendan Byrne is a sports reporter for Central Florida Public Media and host of the podcast Are We There Yet? This episode was produced by Dee Peterschmidt. Thanks for listening. I’m Jane Lindholm.

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