Space News Deep Dive: Big Dreams and Big Booms

Article May 30, 2026
NASA laid out specific plans and a timeline for Phase 1 of their plans to build a Moon base at the lunar south pole. Credit: NASA
NASA laid out specific plans and a timeline for Phase 1 of their plans to build a Moon base at the lunar south pole. Credit: NASA

You know, I had this week’s blog post subject all picked out and ready to go. After all, it’s not every week NASA drops a whole raft of detailed Moon base plans right into humanity’s collective lap. And don’t get me wrong, I’m still going to be talking about that stuff. But all those big Moonbase dreams got slightly derailed not three days after they were shared by the epic explosion of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket on the launchpad on Thursday night.

So let’s see what NASA has cooking for the Moon, what the heck happened in Florida on Thursday, and how that’s likely to throw NASA’s newly revealed plans into a tizzy. In another words, join me as I dive into some beautiful big dreams and gawk at one big boom. 

 

First Building Blocks

Let’s go back to the halcyon days of last Tuesday. NASA held a big press event and laid out a firm timeline for the beginning of the grand Moon base plans they first vaguely outlined back in March (along with a great deal of other ambitious goals, which I covered in this post).

First, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman revealed that the first steps in establishing a permanent base at the lunar south pole would take place before the end of 2026. As a quick aside, the south pole is a highly preferred site for a Moon base due to the suspected presence of ice deposits at the bottoms of the craters in this region. Because of their depth and location on the Moon, the bottoms of these craters don’t see sunlight which would destroy surface ice. Water ice is a critical resource in space, so having a bunch already on site will make establishing a permanent human presence on the Moon much easier.

Blue Origin’s Blue Moon Mark 1 in the thermal testing chamber at Johnson Space Center. Credit: NASA
Blue Origin’s Blue Moon Mark 1 in the thermal testing chamber at Johnson Space Center. Credit: NASA

First up, according to Isaacman, would be something called Moon Base I, scheduled for launch in fall of 2026. This would be a Blue Moon Mark 1 lander from Blue Origin, launched aboard a New Glenn rocket, to land near Shackleton Crater, demonstrating landing procedures for the lunar south pole (not a trivial process) and deploying science payloads.

Next would be Moon Base II, an enormous beast called Griffin-1 from Astrobotic. Scheduled for late 2026, this would be the largest commercial payload sent to the Moon thus far and would provide experience in landing large things near the south pole, targeting Nobile Crater. It would carry a number of payloads, some of which are currently unspecified (which is a wild thing to say about something that is expected to launch before the end of the year).

The last thing expected to go in late 2026 would be IM-3, which is from Intuitive Machines. Despite being called Moon Base III, it appears IM-3’s landing site would not be the lunar south pole, but rather a feature called the Reiner Gamma Swirl, not far from the lunar equator. Lunar swirls are weird, lovely features of our Moon’s surface, and IM-3 is set to carry a number of scientific payloads to check it out.

 

Lunar Mobility

The other contracts announced on Tuesday included a series of drones collectively known as MoonFall, which will be built by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and delivered to the lunar south pole on a spacecraft built by Firefly Aerospace. Their job is to hop around the Moon’s surface and help us learn more about our chosen base site, because for all we’ve already decided we’re building a Moon base there, we don’t actually know that much about it. Which is also wild.

An artist’s rendition of Astrolab’s lunar terrain vehicle being deployed from a Blue Moon Mark 1. Credit: Astrolab
An artist’s rendition of Astrolab’s lunar terrain vehicle being deployed from a Blue Moon Mark 1. Credit: Astrolab

NASA also announced the contracts to build the new lunar terrain vehicles (LTVs), the descendants of the Apollo astronauts’ lunar buggies (though these new ones will also be able to be remotely operated). These will be being built by Astrolab and Lunar Outpost. 

Both the drones and at least one of the LTVs are expected to be at the south pole before Artemis IV launches, which is currently scheduled for 2028. In addition to all of this, the VIPER rover (which was built and then had its mission cancelled by budget cuts and then was repurposed) is supposed to be carried to the lunar south pole by another Blue Moon Mark 1 in 2027. That puts all of this on a crazy short timeline that would be, hmmm, let’s be charitable and say “challenging” to meet, even if everything goes smoothly.

And, of course, as we saw Thursday night, things are not off to a smooth start.

 

Boom

On the night of Thursday May 28th, a New Glenn rocket was running a static fire test in preparation for what would have been only the fourth time the rocket had ever flown. In this type of test the rocket is on the pad all fueled up and fires its engines (without going anywhere—that’s the “static” part of the test). On Thursday, when the engines fired the fully-fueled rocket exploded.

The explosion began with the engines at the bottom of the rocket, as this still frame shows. Credit: Adam Bernstein/Spaceflight Now
The explosion began with the engines at the bottom of the rocket, as this still frame shows. Credit: Adam Bernstein/Spaceflight Now

Fortunately the reports say nobody was injured, and since it was just a test fire the rocket’s payload (a series of Amazon satellites) were not onboard. But it’s the biggest explosion ever seen at Cape Canaveral, and likely the largest rocket explosion since Russia’s N1 detonated during launch in 1969 and scattered debris up to six miles away. The launchpad, known as Complex 36, which is currently the only orbital launch pad Blue Origin has access to, has been shredded and will require extensive repair work to be usable again. 

So right now Blue Origin doesn’t have an orbital launch site. Which isn’t, at the moment, a problem because they also don’t have a usable orbital rocket. New Glenn had only just been cleared for flight again after its last flight suffered a problem with the upper stage and put its payload (a broadband satellite) into too low an orbit. Now you can bet there is going to be an extensive investigation on what the heck happened before any piece of a New Glenn is allowed to go anywhere near a launchpad again.

All of that adds up to a problem for NASA’s grand plans for the Moon.

 

Uh Oh

Look, there just aren’t that many rockets that can get things all the way to the Moon these days. SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy can. If its Starship ever gets its act together enough to finish its testing campaign then Starship also will be a lunar vehicle but progress on that has been…slow. Obviously NASA’s SLS can (seeing as it recently sent Artemis II there) but for many reasons that’s not a rocket you can mass produce. United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur has sent private landers to the Moon before, but it’s currently grounded pending an investigation into why its side boosters keep not working right.

So having New Glenn as an option for sending all of this theoretical hardware Moon-ward was a big deal. Yes, New Glenn is a fairly new rocket, and its third flight didn’t end well for the payload it was carrying, but its first two went off smoothly and the investigation into that third flight issue was done. It seemed likely that New Glenn was about to take its place as one of NASA’s launch workhorses, a title currently claimed most prominently by the SpaceX Falcon 9 (which cannot reach the Moon).

In November 2025 a New Glenn rocket successfully carried NASA’s ESCAPADE Mars mission into space. Credit: Blue Origin
In November 2025 a New Glenn rocket successfully carried NASA’s ESCAPADE Mars mission into space. Credit: Blue Origin

Now that’s not happening. Not this year at least. It seems very, VERY likely that the planned fall 2026 flight of a Blue Moon Mark 1 isn’t going to happen, at least not on that timeline. I hadn’t seen any details on what rocket the other landers scheduled to launch this year were supposed to ride (though the artwork for Astrolab’s LTV shows it being deployed from a Blue Moon Mark 1), but it had to be either a Falcon Heavy or a New Glenn. If it was a New Glenn, I doubt those flights are happening either. 

Depending on how fast repairs can be made to the pad and how fast the investigation into the explosion goes, the delays could trickle down even farther, certainly to the planned 2027 launch of VIPER. Theoretically Blue Origin was also going to be ready to launch a Blue Moon Mark 2 (the version that can have people aboard) for the flight of Artemis III in 2027. I again have big doubts.

 

Picking Up the Pieces

That is a big ol’ boom. Credit: Adam Bernstein/Spaceflight Now
That is a big ol’ boom. Credit: Adam Bernstein/Spaceflight Now

How this will affect launches of things scheduled as far out as 2028 will remain to be seen, and some of those that had been scheduled for New Glenn might be able to be shifted to a Falcon Heavy. But make no mistake, this “anomaly” (I never cease to be amused by space industry euphemisms for explosions) is a big setback, both for Blue Origin and also for NASA and its grand lunar ambitions. Doubtless the full trickle-down will become apparent in the coming weeks.

So obviously, none of this is good news (well, unless you work for SpaceX I guess). I hate to end on a downer though, especially when the week began with such beautiful lofty ambitions, so I’ll leave off with a probably-not-that-surprising confession, coming from someone who obsesses over solar system volcanism and supernovas: I keep rewatching the video of the explosion. Because, as explosions go, this one was gloriously epic and we have to get our little joys where we can.