Starship comprises two stages – the Super Heavy booster, which has 33 engines, and the Starship spacecraft itself, which has six. Before Wednesday’s explosion, the spacecraft was standing alone on the test stand, and not mounted on top of the booster, when it blew up. The engines are test-fired on the Starship before it’s mounted on the booster.
SpaceX had been hoping to launch within the coming weeks had the engine test been successful.
The setback comes as Musk ended his controversial time in Washington leading the US Doge Service and after a cantankerous rift with President Donald Trump, who earlier this month threatened to cancel all of the federal contracts held by Musk’s companies.
Musk retaliated by vowing to cut off Nasa’s access to the company’s Dragon spacecraft, which is the only way the space agency can fly its astronauts to the International Space Station. Musk later recanted, but the threat sent shock waves through Nasa and the Pentagon, which also relies on SpaceX for a variety of crucial missions.
As a result, US officials reached out to several of SpaceX’s competitors, urging them to expedite their efforts so that the Government would not have to heavily rely on one company.
In an interview on May 27, Musk told The Washington Post that he was eager to get back to focusing on SpaceX and Starship, which is also key to his plans to eventually send people to Mars.
Starship, he said, was proving to be a very complicated rocket that was difficult to operate. And he was hoping for a test flight “where hopefully things don’t explode. The last few times it exploded. This is a very real concern”.
Later that day, the rocket lifted off from its launch site in Texas near the Mexico border, but the spacecraft started tumbling and eventually was lost.
Nasa, meanwhile, is eager to get it flying – as are members of Congress, who want to see US astronauts return to the moon before China. But Starship still has a long way to go before it could be used to land astronauts on the lunar surface.
In addition to being able to fly without blowing up, the Starship needs to be able to refuel in orbit, an exceedingly difficult endeavour that’s never before been accomplished. It also has to prove it can safely fly humans on a deep-space mission as well as land autonomously on the moon’s surface and navigate the boulders and craters there.
In 2021, Nasa awarded SpaceX the lone contract to develop a spacecraft capable of landing people on the moon. Blue Origin, the space venture founded by Jeff Bezos, protested the decision, saying it was dangerous to rely on just one company. It eventually won a contract in 2023, but its lunar lander, known as Blue Moon, isn’t scheduled to transport Nasa astronauts to the moon until late this decade at the earliest. (Bezos owns The Post.)
It was not the first time SpaceX has lost a rocket or spacecraft on a test site. In 2016, a Falcon 9 rocket exploded before an engine test while perched on its Cape Canaveral launch site. Then, in 2019, a Dragon spacecraft, designed to fly astronauts, exploded on a test stand.
After both incidents, SpaceX was able to determine the problem, fix it and return to flight.
But Starship is a far more complicated vehicle than those two, and the company in recent months has struggled with its development. Wednesday’s explosion occurred during testing at a site a few miles from the company’s Starbase launch facility before another test flight.
In a post on X, Musk said that preliminary data pointed to a pressure vessel that failed at the top of the rocket.
Christian Davenport covers Nasa and the space industry for The Washington Post’s Financial desk.
