Good morning. It's Friday, May 29th, 2026 — and it was a wild day in aerospace.

**Story one. Blue Origin's New Glenn mega-rocket explodes on the launch pad** at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. During a static fire hot-test, the rocket was engulfed in flames in a major rocket explosion — the worst failure in Blue Origin's existence. The erector-gantry tower was destroyed in the blast. Blue Origin confirmed all personnel have been accounted for. Jeff Bezos said overnight: "Very rough day, but we'll rebuild whatever needs rebuilding and get back to flying." This was supposed to prep for New Glenn's fourth flight — carrying Amazon Leo internet satellites — in the coming weeks. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman says the agency will support a thorough investigation. This is a massive blow to Blue Origin, which had been planning up to twelve New Glenn launches this year. The company is also on the hook for NASA's Artemis lunar missions, including a crewed lunar lander variant. After yesterday's FAA clearance for return to flight from the NG-3 cryogenic leak incident, this is a devastating setback. The New Glenn program will almost certainly be paused for an extended investigation.

**Story two. A Reuters investigation reveals Tesla's own AI training staff don't trust Full Self-Driving.** Inside a Utah facility, hundreds of data labelers review FSD camera footage — and what they're seeing isn't confidence-inspiring. Cars hitting animals, speeding, failing to brake before impact, near-misses with children in streets, and struggling with basic maneuvers like avoiding emergency vehicles or stopping for school buses. Reuters reviewed Tesla's FSD safety report and found the data comparisons don't withstand scrutiny — ten researchers called it misleading marketing rather than a serious safety investigation. The safety stats, which Tesla says show FSD is up to ten times safer than human drivers, appear inflated by roughly three times, partly because labelers said they wouldn't ride in a fully autonomous Tesla robotaxi. This comes as Tesla continues pushing public demos of unsupervised robotaxi capability. Meanwhile, the robotaxi pilot in Austin that launched last June was running with hidden human safety monitors — both in-car and remote — despite Musk's claims of general-purpose autonomy. The contrast with Waymo is striking.

**Story three. And while Tesla faces scrutiny, Waymo is quietly dominating.** Waymo is leading autonomous vehicle registrations in Texas by a wide margin according to a new AV tracker tool enabled by state law — the clearest picture yet of robotaxi deployment across the nation's second-largest state. Waymo's data shows 127 million fully autonomous miles with their driver ten times less likely to be involved in a serious crash compared to humans. Separately, Waymo announced its new custom-designed robotaxi — called Ojai, developed with Hyundai — will start rides in the next few weeks. The Jaguar I-Pace fleet will continue alongside it. Waymo is building real operational scale while competitors are still mapping the gap between demos and deployment.

That's all for today. Have a great weekend.