Generated Title: A Broken Tweet for a Broken Promise: New Glenn Fuels Up Amidst Digital Decay
You really can’t make this stuff up.
Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’s gargantuan, slow-motion space company, decided to grace the world with an update on its perpetually-almost-ready rocket, New Glenn. The big news? “New Glenn propellant loading is underway.” Groundbreaking. After a decade of development and more delays than a Spirit Airlines flight during a blizzard, they’re finally pouring some space juice into the tank.
But that’s not the story. Oh no. The real story, the part that’s just so perfectly, poetically pathetic, is what came right after that sentence on New Glenn propellant loading is underway. - X: “JavaScript is not available.”
A multi-billion-dollar aerospace venture, a company that’s supposed to be building the very infrastructure for humanity’s future in the cosmos, can’t get a simple tweet to render properly. It’s a bad look. No, 'bad' doesn't even begin to cover it. It's a self-inflicted wound, a digital pratfall on a stage they built themselves. And honestly, I’m not even mad. I’m impressed. You couldn’t have engineered a more fitting metaphor if you tried.
The Perfect Metaphor
Let’s be brutally honest here. For years, Blue Origin has operated like a pristine, hermetically-sealed laboratory. Everything is quiet, deliberate, and draped in the language of grand, ponderous destiny. Their motto is Gradatim Ferociter—"Step by Step, Ferociously." But from the outside, it has looked a lot more like "Step by Step, Glacially."
Meanwhile, SpaceX is across the street throwing wrenches, blowing stuff up on camera, and launching rockets every other day. The contrast is everything.
So when Blue Origin posts a minor technical update—not a launch, not a full static fire, but just pumping propellant—and the post itself breaks, it’s more than just a glitch. It’s like seeing a crack in the polished marble facade of a bank. It doesn’t mean the whole building is coming down, but it sure as hell makes you question the quality of the maintenance. If you can’t get a basic JavaScript function to run on a platform designed for 280-character thoughts, are you really the people I trust with seven million pounds of thrust?
Am I being too cynical? Maybe. It’s just one social media glitch. It doesn’t mean the rocket will explode. But then again, in a game of literal rocket science, a world where a single misplaced decimal point can mean catastrophe, don't the little things matter most? The attention to detail, or lack thereof, is telling. It’s a tiny signal that broadcasts a much larger message: the slick, corporate presentation might just be hiding a mess of tangled wires underneath.
A Decade of 'Almost There'
This whole "propellant loading" event is classic corporate PR. It’s a non-update framed as a milestone. What does “underway” even mean? Are they trickling it in with an eyedropper? Is the tank 1% full or 99% full? The vagueness is the point. It’s designed to create a feeling of momentum, to placate impatient observers and maybe, just maybe, convince a few people that this time, for real, the launch is just around the corner.
I’m so tired of this. It reminds me of every terrible corporate website I’m forced to use, bloated with so much tracking code and useless JavaScript frameworks that it grinds my browser to a halt. Companies spend millions on a slick veneer but forget to make the damn thing work. It’s the same philosophy. Style over substance. Announcement over action.
And let’s not forget, New Glenn was supposed to fly in 2020. Then 2021. Then 2022. Now we’re hoping for sometime in late 2024, maybe. For a rocket that’s been in development for over a decade, “we’re putting fuel in it” ain’t the headline they think it is. They want us to see this as progress, as momentum, but all I see is a company that's great at press releases and not much else—
It’s an attempt to project competence while the evidence—the years of delays, the loss of major contracts to rivals, the broken tweet—screams something else entirely. They want the roar of the engine, but all we’re getting is the buzz of a 404 error.
So, Are We Supposed to Be Impressed?
Look, I want New Glenn to fly. Competition is good. Another heavy-lift rocket on the market would be fantastic for the entire industry. But this ain’t it. This carefully managed drip of information, packaged in a technically broken container, isn’t reassuring. It’s worrying.
The irony is that the JavaScript error is the most honest thing Blue Origin has communicated in years. It’s a moment of unplanned transparency. Behind the grand vision and the Latin mottos is a system with bugs. And until that rocket is sitting on the pad, fully stacked and venting propellant we can all see with our own eyes, this is all just digital smoke. The broken tweet told me more about the state of Blue Origin than the actual words in it ever could, because its a perfect, beautiful, accidental piece of honesty.
