Explosions (Not) in the Sky

Explosions (Not) in the Sky 2026-05-31T07:15:00+00:00, by Emma Humphries, from Infinite Wishes 🏳️‍⚧️🚀 This past Friday evening, a Blue Origin New Glenn rocket, fueled with liquid methane and oxygen, exploded on the pad during a test fire, obliterating the rocket and much of the pad and its ground infrastructure. It may be more than a year before the New Glenn flies again. This will delay NASA’s plan to land people on the Moon for the first time in over 50 years12, but the upside is that there’ll be slightly less Kessler Syndrome bait launched into LEO3. The next evening, YouTube served up a NASA safety film from the US National Archives4. All about handling all the dangerous propellants used by many rockets-things that my wife, a chemist by training, is glad not to work with-hypergolics and monopropellants. Stuff with lots of nitrogen and oxygens in them. And anything with enough nitrogen in it is angry and does not want to exist. The opening narration, over the footage of a…