One in all 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 post on X, and claimed there are “no hazards to residents in surrounding communities.” The corporate mentioned in a later update on Thursday that an preliminary evaluation suggests the explosion was attributable to a failure of of a “pressurized tank often called a COPV, or composite overwrapped stress vessel” within the Starship’s nosecone.
The big explosion triggered injury to the realm surrounding the take a look at stand, in accordance with SpaceX. However the firm mentioned there are not any reported accidents. SpaceX was making ready to carry out a “static fireplace” of the Starship’s six Raptor engines, and so the realm across the rocket had been cleared previous to the explosion.
It’s not instantly clear what influence this can have on SpaceX’s improvement of the Starship rocket system. A latest advisory from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) recommended the tenth take a look at flight might have occurred as quickly as June 29. That may most definitely be delayed as the corporate works by way of what went improper on Wednesday evening.
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 creating the 171-foot Starship and the huge 232-foot Tremendous Heavy booster that powers it into house. The corporate began 2025 saying this yr could be a “transformational” one for this system, and the FAA lately increased its limit on Starship launches in Texas from 5 to 25.
However Starship, specifically, has had a lot 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 Could than through the earlier two checks, 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” likelihood in a company update in May. 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 data from SpaceX about what it believes to be the reason for the explosion.
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