One among SpaceX’s Starship launch automobiles exploded on a check stand in Texas late on Wednesday evening, as the corporate ready for the tenth check flight of the heavy-lift rocket system.
SpaceX stated “all personnel are protected and accounted for” in a post on X, and claimed there are “no hazards to residents in surrounding communities.” The corporate didn’t present an evidence for the explosion.
It’s not instantly clear what impression it will have on SpaceX’s improvement of the Starship rocket system. A latest advisory from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) recommended the tenth check flight may have occurred as quickly as June 29.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk stated in a post seemingly related to the explosion that he considers it to be: “Only a scratch.”
SpaceX has spent the previous couple of years aggressively creating the 171-foot Starship and the huge 232-foot Tremendous Heavy booster that powers it into house. The corporate began 2025 saying this 12 months could be a “transformational” one for this system, and the FAA not too long ago increased its limit on Starship launches in Texas from 5 to 25.
However Starship, particularly, has had a lot of issues this 12 months. The rocket unexpectedly exploded throughout its seventh check flight in January, after which once more in March. It failed once more throughout its ninth check in Might.
Whereas the rocket made it additional into its most up-to-date flight in Might than in the course of the earlier two checks, it nonetheless didn’t deploy the dummy Starlink satellites it was carrying onboard — an important step within the firm’s plan to make use of the mega-rocket to develop its space-based web service.
Musk has maintained that SpaceX is on monitor to attempt to ship a Starship to Mars in 2026, giving it a “50/50” probability in a company update in May. The corporate can be creating a bigger “Model 3” of Starship that, Musk claimed, may fly as early as this 12 months.