Blue Origin rocket explosion: How space stocks are reacting just weeks before highly anticipated SpaceX IPO

Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket exploded Thursday night due to an “anomaly” during its hotfire test. Video shows the rocket becoming engulfed in a big ball of flame at Florida’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. “All personnel are accounted for and safe,” Blue Origin CEO Jeff Bezos wrote on X. “It’s too early to know the root cause but we’re already working to find it. Very rough day, but we’ll rebuild whatever needs rebuilding and get back to flying. It’s worth it.” The latter part of that message brought many calls for the billionaire to focus, instead, on food insecurity, climate change, and other challenges here on Earth. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman doubled down on Bezos’s message in his own X post: “Spaceflight is unforgiving, and developing new heavy-lift launch capability is extraordinarily difficult. We will work with our partners to support a thorough investigation of this anomaly, assess near-term mission impacts, and get back to launching rockets.” The rocket exploded while it was being tested for an upcoming flight—New Glenn’s fourth mission. Space-related stocks have already been seeing major movement Shares of AST SpaceMobile (NASDAQ: ASTS), a designer of satellites, had been rallying in recent weeks as investors await the highly anticipated IPO from Elon Musk’s SpaceX. However, the stock was down over 16 in premarket trading on Friday. AST SpaceMobile had taken part in New Glenn’s mission in April, when things also didn’t go as planned. The third mission’s goal was to put AST SpaceMobile’s BlueBird 7 satellite into orbit, but an upper-stage failure prevented it, with the satellite remaining in too low an orbit to sustain it. But shares of AST SpaceMobile also fell in the wake of a Bloomberg report on Thursday indicating that SpaceX may be targeting a lower valuation of 1.8 trillion. (The report cited anonymous sources and was not confirmed by SpaceX.) Meanwhile, Blue Origin’s competitor Virgin Galactic Holdings (NYSE: SPCE) saw its shares rise over 17 in premarket trading on Friday. At the time of publication, the shares were up about 6.8.