Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket ex­ploded on the launch­pad dur­ing a sta­tic-fire test Thursday at Cape Canaveral, in what the com­pany de­scribed with ad­mirable cor­po­rate dis­ci­pline as an “anomaly,” the aero­space term for “the 29-story rocket turned into a Rhode Island sized fire­ball.” The blast is an­other set­back for Jeff Bezos’s moon-bound hob­by­horse, which is try­ing to pre­sent it­self as a sober NASA part­ner and fu­ture satel­lite-launch work­horse while cur­rently re­sem­bling the world’s most ex­pen­sive Michael Bay screen test. Blue Origin of­fi­cials said it was too early to iden­tify the root cause, though early can­di­dates in­clude fire and heat some­how be­ing in­volved.

Company sources said Blue Origin re­mains fo­cused on fu­ture flights, lu­nar mis­sions, and com­pet­ing with Starlink, which is the kind of calm, for­ward-look­ing mes­sag­ing in­vestors love to hear im­me­di­ately af­ter watch­ing a launch­pad be­come a trailer for Transformers: Prime Logistics. The nice thing about Bezos’s space com­pany, though, is its grow­ing con­sis­tency with the rest of the em­pire: Alexa burned bil­lions in pri­vate for years, but New Glenn has fi­nally found a way to de­liver that same share­holder ex­pe­ri­ence with bet­ter vi­su­als.