“The Blue Origin team made t-shirts with the phrase ‘It was worth it'”

NASA has awarded Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ company and SpaceX’s great rivalfrom Elon Musk, a contract to participate in the construction of a lunar base. Days later, the New Glennthe reusable rocket with which the company wants to achieve its ambitions, exploded before his big test. For anyone, it would be a monumental disaster, but Blue Origin employees took the opportunity to create t-shirts with a message.

“It was worth it.”

The accident. It was on May 29 when the New Glenn exploded and was engulfed by a gigantic fireball during a test known as a ‘hotfire’. This is a test in which the engines are turned on not with the aim of taking off, but to check whether the systems are working optimally.

During it, the rocket remains anchored to the platform, but as detailed the team, “an anomaly” occurred that led to the explosion. “The rockets are complicated”, commented an Elon Musk who has suffered several of these anomalies with his people and Bezos himself also played down the matter even though he acknowledged that it had been a setback.

I rent. Within the framework of the Vivatech 2026 fair, the businessman gave a talk in which he commented on various topics, such as the controversies with Prometheus, his AI company, but where he focused on the space ambitions of his other company. And the first thing that was commented on was, precisely, the explosion. “We were very lucky,” he says, because the equipment was safe and only material damage occurred, but also because it is a procedure that must be gone through.

The billionaire has shared that, the day after the incident and sporadically, the ‘Blue Team’ that was in charge of the rocket and that test made t-shirts with the message “It was worth it” printed on it.

It makes sense. This seems like a contradiction, since it involves months and months of work wasted, not to mention money, but it makes sense and the explanation is extremely simple: when a rocket ‘dies’ during a ground test, no one gets hurt and it is much better than a rocket that ‘dies’ during a mission or with a crew. Aside from that, when a rocket fails in that scenario, the error itself gives back a huge amount of data that engineers can use to improve.

As long as this disaster occurs in the testing phase without critical load or people, it is simply an economic loss that is absorbed into the program costs. What that test returns in the form of data on pressures, temperatures, vibrations and telemetry is almost more valuable.

Fail fast. In fact, SpaceX itself has converted This is a work philosophy, “fail fast, learn even faster”, starting with some deliberately imperfect prototypes that are improved with each test. This way engineers see where there is a bottleneck and start working on it to come up with another prototype and see if that bottleneck has been resolved… and where the next one is.

That is why, in some explosions, there are happy engineers hugging each other. It is still a ‘successful failure’. This has a cost, of course, estimated at 90-100 million dollars per vehicle which, in the end, greatly increases the total costs of the projects. HE esteem that, for example, SpaceX invested $2 billion in 2023 alone.

Next steps. Bezos has settled the issue of the explosion by stating that they have recreated everything, they have collected everything they needed to collect and he has made a promise: to fly before the end of the year. We’ll see if they succeed, since this new space race is full of objectives and dates that are not met.

Let them tell Artemis II (although it ended up going well).

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