Steel cubes and steel spheres were propelled in radial directions by a detonating cylindrical high explosive charge at scaled distances of 0.05-0.25 m kg(-1/3). The analysed velocities can be simply transferred to momenta, to energies and analysed impulse densities. A little surprising result is that the cubes with the larger area mass achieved remarkably higher velocities compared to the spheres. This is definitely a result caused by different air drag coefficients. The achieved impulse densities at these near distances are in the magnitude comparable with the values available in the literature.