One among SpaceX’s Starship launch autos exploded on a check stand in Texas late on Wednesday night time, as the corporate ready for the tenth check flight of the heavy-lift rocket system.
SpaceX mentioned “all personnel are secure and accounted for” in a post on X, and claimed there are “no hazards to residents in surrounding communities.” The corporate didn’t present a proof for the explosion.
It’s not instantly clear what impression it will have on SpaceX’s improvement of the Starship rocket system. A current advisory from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) prompt the tenth check flight might have occurred as quickly as June 29.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk mentioned 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 growing the 171-foot Starship and the huge 232-foot Tremendous Heavy booster that powers it into area. The corporate began 2025 saying this yr could be a “transformational” one for this system, and the FAA just lately increased its limit on Starship launches in Texas from 5 to 25.
However Starship, particularly, has had plenty of issues this yr. The rocket unexpectedly exploded during its seventh test flight in January, after which again in March. It failed once more throughout its ninth test in May.
Whereas the rocket made it additional into its most up-to-date flight in Might than throughout the earlier two assessments, 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” likelihood in a company update in May. The corporate can be growing a bigger “Model 3” of Starship that, Musk claimed, might fly as early as this yr.