Starship Explosions Show SpaceX No Longer Defying Gravity
Consecutive losses of the Starship rocket suggest that the company’s engineers are not as infallible as its fans may think.
Consecutive losses of the Starship rocket suggest that the company’s engineers are not as infallible as its fans may think.
For SpaceX, 2025 should have been the best year yet.
Elon Musk, the founder of the private space company, is one of the most influential people in the Oval Office, and President Trump has endorsed his vision of sending humans to Mars.
But so far, it has not been a great year for the rocket company. The vehicle that is central to the Mars goal, SpaceX’s giant Starship rocket, has launched twice this year, and twice, it has blown up.
The latest explosion occurred on Thursday during the eighth test flight of Starship, less than two months after the seventh test flight also came apart in space. Again, a shower of debris rained down, creating a novel headache for travelers around Florida and the Caribbean who were unaccustomed to seeing “falling space debris” as the reason for flight delays. Neither incident injured anyone.
Explosions are not necessarily failures for a company that has thrived on a mind-set of “launch it, break it, fix it, launch again.” With innovations like landing and reusing rocket boosters, SpaceX has slashed the cost of sending stuff to space. Starship, designed to be fully reusable, has the potential to upend the rocket business once again.
But these two Starship explosions were a step backward in SpaceX’s development process, as the flights could not even repeat the successes of earlier test flights, and they perhaps show that the company’s engineers are not as infallible as fans of the company sometimes like to think.
“There’s this persona that has built up around SpaceX, but you’re starting to see that they’re human, too,” said Daniel Dumbacher, a former NASA official who is now a professor of engineering practice at Purdue University and chief innovation and strategy officer for Special Aerospace Services, an engineering and manufacturing company whose customers include NASA, the United States Space Force and some of SpaceX’s competitors.
