After explosion in May, Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin plans new takeoff in 2026

Blue Origin ship explodes during test on the launch pad
Blue Origin expects to resume aircraft launches later this year, said the company's CEO, David Limp, this Wednesday (17). The executive spoke at the VivaTech conference in Paris, alongside the company's founder, billionaire Jeff Bezos.
According to Limp, reconstruction of the launch pad site, located in Florida, has already begun. The executive, however, did not provide further details or a predicted completion date.
Do you have any suggestions for a report? Send it to g1
The statement comes after New Glen, a Blue Origin spacecraft, exploded during a test at the launch base in May this year.
The explosion happened around 10pm, when the space vehicle was undergoing a static ignition test, when it did not take off.
The experiment focused on the future NG-4 mission. The plan is for the ship to send the first 48 Amazon Leo satellites into space, similar to those used by Elon Musk's Starlink.
At the time, Musk lamented the ship's explosion. SpaceX and Blue Origin are the main companies in the commercial space race in the world.
On the social network X, also owned by Musk, the billionaire lamented what happened and wished the competitor to recover quickly.
Blue Origin has already carried out three test flights with New Glenn, all without crew. The first took place in early 2025, when the ship carried a prototype of another spacecraft created to deploy satellites in space.
The second test took place in November 2025 and served to send probes designed to reach Mars in 2027. The trip was commissioned by NASA and was marked as the first commercial mission of the Blue Origin spacecraft.
The third experiment was carried out in April 2026. It was the first time that the company reused a propellant, a feat that intensified the rivalry with SpaceX.
Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and Blue Origin, and co-founder and co-CEO of Prometheus, participates in the 10th edition of the VivaTech startups and technological innovation fair in Paris, France, in June 2026.
Abdul Saboor/Reuters
Artificial intelligence was also a topic
Bezos, in turn, stated during a speech that Although he understands that there is a concern that artificial intelligence (AI) will make humans "redundant", he does not believe in this scenario.
"I know that there is a lot of concern on the part of a lot of people, including a lot of smart people, that AI is going to make humans unnecessary and so on," Bezos said. "I completely disagree with that point of view. And I think that, in fact, AI will cause labor shortages."
Half of Americans fear that the advance of AI could leave them or someone in their family without a job, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released this month.
Bezos, the fourth richest person in the world, with a net worth of around US$250 billion (about R$1.3 trillion), argued that people have things "endless" things to do and are currently limited by barriers that he says AI would reduce.
One of the goals of space exploration is to move polluting industries off Earth, said Bezos, whose Blue Origin aims to compete with trillionaire Elon Musk's SpaceX in the rocket industry.
"If space travel becomes reliable and cheap enough, and we can get materials from asteroids, near-Earth objects and the Moon, then this garden planet could return to its pre-Industrial Revolution state," Bezos said.
Musk also laid out an ambitious vision for space ahead of SpaceX's IPO last week, including plans to create cities on the Moon and Mars. In an interview with JP Morgan Chief Executive Jamie Dimon last week, he talked about launching AI data centers into space and vacationing on the Moon.
*With information from Reuters news agency

Source: G1