Elon Musk’s SpaceX Starship rocket explodes in conventional engine test

SpaceX’s rocket may have been built as Mars – but for now, it doesn’t seem to be able to make a piece of it through Earth’s atmosphere.

SpaceX’s Starship Rocket exploded in flames during regular engine tests Wednesday night, a series of increasing failures in Elon Musk’s spacecraft. The explosion ignited the night sky in southern Texas and flew out debris on the Starbase test site near Brownsville. This is the fourth starship to lose only this year.

Musk’s reaction? Breezy: “Just scratches,” he posted on X.

“All personnel are safe and responsible” and are now “working with local officials to deal with explosions and safe locations,” SpaceX said. The company requires residents not to approach the area when operations continue.

SpaceX said the Rockets experienced “main anomalies” during a static fire test around 11 p.m. local time. Preliminary data suggest that the pressurized nitrogen storage unit – COPV (or composite cover pressure vessel) – may fail. “If further investigation confirms that this is what happened, it’s the first time this design has been done,” Musk wrote on X.

The explosion happened while the rocket was not even flying. It just sits on the test bench and performs routine checks before future releases. The fact that it detonated before it took off (two based on footage showing back-to-back explosions) would only deepen concerns about the reliability of the program, especially as the U.S. government continues to invest billions in company ambitions.

The event is the latest in a series of compelling starship failures that raise new questions about rockets’ viability and its central role in NASA’s Artemis program, which aims to send American astronauts to the moon by the end of the decade. The Starship is the most powerful launcher ever, 400 feet tall and 39 engines in total. It is also SpaceX’s most ambitious and complex vehicle, designed to be completely reusable and capable of interplanetary travel. Musk has long talked about colonizing Mars.

But for all the futuristic hopes of SpaceX and Musk, the reality has been grim so far.

In January, an interstellar spacecraft vehicle broke down a few minutes after launch, spreading debris across the Caribbean Islands. Two months later, in March, when the Rockets lost control and exploded, another launch failed, and then the reentry operation was completed.

Then, in May, SpaceX’s most promising launch to date took it deeper into the flight plan – But it still ends with a fiery destruction. The starship successfully launched and separated from the booster, but during reentry it lost control and collapsed in the atmosphere. The Federal Aviation Administration later determined that hardware failures in one of the engines were possible.

All three missions are full-stack flights designed to test the ability of rockets to take off, separate, survive and re-enter and perform controlled landings – which would be crucial if the vehicle transports astronauts to the moon or Mars. However, as each attempt ends with disintegration, the project’s schedule seems to be increasingly fragile.

SpaceX stressed that early failures were part of the iterative testing process, which had previously rebounded from catastrophic setbacks, including the 2016 Falcon 9 explosion at Cape Canaveral and the 2019 test explosion involving crew Dragon aircraft. In both cases, the company identified the root cause and returned to the flight within a few months.

But the interstellar spacecraft is much more complicated. Higher bet.

NASA has awarded SpaceX more than $4 billion to develop a Starship version of crew Lunar Lander version and depends on the company providing a functional vehicle for the planned Artemis login by 2026. The Rockets also need to prove that it can prove that it can refuel in orbit – a task that has never been technically difficult, a task that has never been accomplished – before it started serious Lunar or Mars Mars Mars Mars. Still, Musk recently claimed SpaceX will hit Revenue this year is $15.5 billion.

So are the political landscapes around SpaceX More and more troublesome. Earlier this month, Musk had openly clashed with President Donald Trump, who threatened to cancel SpaceX’s federal contract. Musk threatened to fire through the company’s Dragon Capsule to deny NASA’s chance to enter the International Space Station, which he later returned, but did not before Washington’s nerves were shocked.

The dispute reportedly prompted U.S. officials to urge other commercial space providers such as Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin to accelerate their crew’s lunar landing plans to reduce reliance on SpaceX. Blue Origin’s Blue Moon Lander wasn’t planning to perform crew missions until later in the decade, but the company won a NASA contract in 2023 after losing SpaceX’s initial bid in 2021.

SpaceX said it is reviewing data from the explosion on Wednesday and will “apply lessons learned” to future tests. But after four failures in six months, these lessons began to pile up.

The same is true for the problem.