The company’s response to the launchpad blast has become a key test for Artemis III

As Blue Origin tells it, the most spectacular launchpad explosion in recent memory, which destroyed its pioneering New Glenn space rocket last month and severely damaged almost everything around it, was merely a blip.

“We will fly again before the end of this year. Gradatim Ferociter,” Dave Limp, the company’s chief executive, posted on X on 1 June, using the Latin form of its motto, “Step by step, ferociously”.

Luca Parmitano to pilot all-male crew of four paving way for planned first human landing on Artemis IV in 2028

Jared Isaacman, the Nasa administrator, hailed the creation of “Earth’s first starfleet” on Tuesday as he revealed the Artemis III crew and details of the next stages of the space agency’s project to return humans to the moon.

An Italian astronaut, Luca Parmitano of the European Space Agency (ESA), will be the pilot of the planned two-week mission to lower Earth orbit next year that will test lunar landers from private companies Blue Origin and SpaceX.

Die neue Trägerrakete seiner Firma Blue Origin ist bei einem Triebwerktest auf der Startrampe in Florida explodiert. Sie sollte kommende Woche bei ihrem vierten Flug Amazon-Satelliten ins All bringen.

No personnel were harmed in the incident, the company said on social media, calling the explosion an ‘anomaly’

Nasa’s plans to build a lunar base and return humans to the moon in the next two years were thrown into jeopardy after a New Glenn rocket from Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin company exploded during a test in Florida.

A massive fireball engulfed and destroyed the launchpad at the Kennedy Space Center seconds after the start of the scheduled “hotfire” test at 9pm ET, and an orange sky was visible in Fort Pierce, 185km (115 miles) to the south.

Three lunar landings are planned for this year in preparation for the construction of a $20bn moon base

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Nasa announced on Tuesday ambitious plans for three uncrewed lunar missions this year to kickstart construction of a $20bn moon base, and said it had chosen the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, ahead of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, to conduct the first.

The revelation by Nasa’s administrator, Jared Isaacman, at a press conference in Washington DC marked the first detailed public explanation of how and when the moon base will be built.

The Artemis missions are paving the way to civilizational decisions. It’s time to ask not just what we can do – but whether we should do it

This month’s splashdown of Artemis II was rightly celebrated as a technical achievement. Four astronauts traveled farther from Earth than any humans in history and returned safely. It is an extraordinary thing to send people into deep space and bring them home again. Nobody should deny that.

But the real significance of Artemis II lies elsewhere.

The rival superpowers are ramping up preparations for a crewed lunar landing nearly six decades after the first moon walk

The world watched earlier this month as Nasa sent four astronauts around the moon – but to actually land on the surface the US is once again in a space race, this time with China. And China may well win.

Both countries plan to build inhabited lunar bases – the first settlement on another celestial body – as well as searching for rare resources and using the deep space environment to test technology for future crewed missions to Mars.

Andy Jassy tells shareholders that long-awaited rival to Elon Musk’s Starlink is ‘on the verge’ of going live

Amazon has said its long-awaited satellite internet rival to Elon Musk’s Starlink will finally go live in “mid-2026”.

The chief executive, Andy Jassy, said in a letter to shareholders that the technology company was “on the verge of launching Amazon Leo” and had secured “revenue commitments from enterprises and governments” for the scheme.

Die Nasa will wieder Menschen auf den Mond bringen, doch die Technik hält nicht mit. Die Mondlander könnten umkippen, und es gibt weitere Bedenken. Warum die astronautische Mondlandung wohl auch 2028 ausfallen wird.

In a statement shared on Instagram, Nguyen says she faced a ‘tsunami of harassment’ after the all-female spaceflight

Amanda Nguyen, the Vietnamese-American astronaut who was part of the all-female Blue Origin spaceflight, has opened up about her depression after she experienced a “tsunami of harassment” after the trip, in which she became the first Vietnamese woman to go to space.

Nguyen, 34, was part of April’s historic 11-minute flight, whose crew included pop star Katy Perry, broadcast journalist Gayle King, and journalist and wife of Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos, Lauren Sánchez. The flight was heavily criticized for its environmental impact and critics questioned its purpose and use of resources.