The dream of returning humans to the Moon took a hit this week. Not from a rival superpower. Not from a budget cut. From a rocket explosion on a Texas test stand. Blue Origin’s New Glenn upper stage blew up during a pressure test. The fallout is political, not just technical.
Here is the bit they do not want you to overlook. The engines that failed? They rely on UK-built components. A small firm in Banbury makes the turbopumps. Another in Bristol supplies the cryogenic valves. When the debris settled, Whitehall realised its exposure. British engineering is proud. But it is also a single point of failure.
Sources close to the UK Space Agency tell me they are “deeply concerned”. Not about the explosion itself. About the knock-on effect. Nasa’s Artemis programme, which aims to land the next man and first woman on the Moon, leans heavily on Blue Origin. And Blue Origin leans on British parts. If this explosion delays the launch schedule, British MPs will face questions. Why did we bet everything on one American company?
The answer is the usual one. Money. The UK government has invested millions in the space sector, hoping to grab a share of the global market. They backed Blue Origin’s bid for the Lunar Lander contract. They saw it as a chance to tie British manufacturing to a moon shot. Now that shot has misfired.
Inside the Lobby, the talk is of a wider pattern. Brexit was supposed to free Britain to strike its own space deals. Instead, it has left us dependent on a handful of US primes. “We swapped one master for another,” a former minister told me last night, over a pint. He was not joking.
The explosion comes at a bad time for Nasa. Its own giant rocket, the SLS, is over budget and behind schedule. Now its backup plan is in flames. Literally. The Artemis timeline was already tight. 2024? 2025? Now whispers suggest 2027 or later. That is a political eternity.
Downing Street is watching. The Prime Minister’s science adviser has been on the phone to Washington. But there is little London can do. The UK does not have its own heavy-lift rocket. It does not even have a functioning launch site on home soil. The much-touted spaceport in Cornwall is still waiting for its first orbital launch. So we wait. And we worry.
The opposition is sharpening its knives. Labour’s shadow science minister is planning a parliamentary question. “How many British jobs depend on a single US rocket?” The answer is not one the government wants to give.
For now, the story is buried. The headlines are about the blast radius, the investigation, the technical fixes. But the real story is political. It is about the illusion of sovereignty. About a small island nation that built a global reputation on precision engineering, then hitched its future to someone else’s rocket.
The smoke will clear. The questions will not.
