SpaceX appears to have mastered the production of the Starship Heavy Booster, but it is experiencing significant challenges in getting its Starship second stage to function as intended.
It should come as no surprise that getting Starship to be the reliable, fully reusable, and rapid-turnaround rocket that Elon Musk envisions is not going entirely smoothly. After all, nothing like it has ever been done. It is larger, has more thrust and payload capacity, and is in every way far more ambitious in scope than even the Saturn V rocket that sent men to the moon.
It makes the most successful rocket in human history–the SpaceX Falcon 9–look like a firecracker. And the Falcon 9 delivers more payload to orbit every year than every other entity in the world combined, by a large margin. Perhaps 90% of all mass sent into orbit in a given year is delivered by SpaceX rockets.
“Man, Starship is a hard, hard, hard project. This is the biggest rocket ever made.
It will have a thrust and mass double that of a Saturn V, which is the largest rocket to reach orbit. And it is intended to be fully and rapidly reusable.”
Elon Musk
pic.twitter.com/TsudYABgYS— Tesla Owners Silicon Valley (@teslaownersSV) February 9, 2025
But building Starship is correspondingly more difficult, in proportion to its ambition. And SpaceX is having a hell of a time getting its second stage of Starship to complete a mission. And while every mission so far has been a test of improvements to the original design and not expected to be 100% successful, each successive flight has seemed to move its failure point backward, not forward.
🚨#BREAKING: Watch as SpaceX Starship 36 explodes during static fire test right before launch later this month
Watch as a massive explosion erupts near Starbase City, Texas, during a critical moment in SpaceX’s preparations for Starship Flight 10. The… pic.twitter.com/Rp2tlddenf
— R A W S A L E R T S (@rawsalerts) June 19, 2025
The last two tests ended in failures that resulted in catastrophic “rapid unscheduled disassemblies,” SpaceX’s cheeky description of the spacecraft being destroyed while in flight. Prior to that, several craft have either burned up in the atmosphere during reentry, although SpaceX has also managed to get the spacecraft down in damaged but essentially complete splashdowns.
This Starship just exploded during the static fire test, not during launch. Don’t let the leftist media twist the facts.
— DogeDesigner (@cb_doge) June 19, 2025
But exploding on the ground during a test is a step backward, although Elon took the failure in stride, putting out a sardonic tweet referring to Monty Python’s “black knight” scene in The Holy Grail.
SPACEX: After the malfunction of Starship during a test burn Elon Musk took to X and posted, “Just a scratch.” perhaps in reference to the classic 1975 movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail (I think Elon and I were just 4 when it came out, but it played non-stop at the movie… pic.twitter.com/YVLUdgQyKV
— @amuse (@amuse) June 19, 2025
Failure is not an option with Starship. Even if it can never live up to its lofty expectations, even a partially reusable Starship would be a massive step forward in delivering payload to orbit affordably. It’s sheer mass, the reusability of the first stage, and a Starship that can remain in space safely and be used to ferry materials to the moon would be a massive achievement. And Starship is a key component of the plan to complete Starlink.
Starship booster catch today gives me goosebumps. This is peak human engineering here 🚀 pic.twitter.com/hptG9NhV2B
— Latest in space (@latestinspace) January 17, 2025
Getting to Mars is just a bonus round, although it is Musk’s personal goal. As a practical matter, pursuing that dream would hinder, not help, SpaceX’s profitability.
Starship is also key to NASA’s moon missions, although frankly, there may be better alternatives for a moon lander. And the ambitious timeline NASA has been pursuing has never seemed reasonable to me.
It’s too early to know why this particular explosion happened, but Elon’s run of bad luck had better end soon. SpaceX needs Starship to work.
