Certainly one of SpaceX’s Starship rockets exploded on a take a look at stand in Texas late on Wednesday evening, as the corporate ready for the tenth take a look at flight of the heavy-lift rocket system.
SpaceX mentioned “all personnel are secure and accounted for” in a submit on X, and claimed there are “no hazards to residents in surrounding communities.” The corporate mentioned in a later replace on Thursday that an preliminary evaluation suggests the explosion was attributable to a failure of of a “pressurized tank often known as a COPV, or composite overwrapped stress vessel” within the Starship’s nosecone.
The big explosion brought about injury to the world surrounding the take a look at stand, in keeping with SpaceX. However the firm mentioned there are not any reported accidents. SpaceX was getting ready to carry out a “static fireplace” of the Starship’s six Raptor engines, and so the world across the rocket had been cleared previous to the explosion.
It’s not instantly clear what impression this can have on SpaceX’s improvement of the Starship rocket system. A current advisory from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) instructed the tenth take a look at flight might have occurred as quickly as June 29. That can most definitely be delayed as the corporate works by what went unsuitable on Wednesday evening.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk mentioned in a submit seemingly associated 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 area. The corporate began 2025 saying this yr could be a “transformational” one for this system, and the FAA not too long ago elevated its restrict on Starship launches in Texas from 5 to 25.
However Starship, specifically, has had a variety of issues this yr. The rocket unexpectedly exploded throughout its seventh take a look at flight in January, after which once more in March. It failed once more throughout its ninth take a look at in Might.
Whereas the rocket made it additional into its most up-to-date flight in Might than through the earlier two assessments, it nonetheless didn’t deploy the dummy Starlink satellites it was carrying onboard — a vital 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 an organization replace in Might. The corporate can be creating a bigger “Model 3” of Starship that, Musk claimed, might fly as early as this yr.
This story has been up to date with new info from SpaceX about what it believes to be the reason for the explosion.
