SpaceX’s Starship Launches Before Exploding 24 Miles Up

Space is hard, as people in the business like to say, and SpaceX delivered a dramatic demonstration of that when its massive Starship rocket(Opens in a new window) launched and then began tumbling out of control before exploding four minutes after liftoff.

“Starship just experienced what we called a rapid unscheduled disassembly,” launch commentator John Insprucker observed as bits of rocket shrapnel rained down from the upper atmosphere.

The uncrewed test flight began at 9:33 a.m. ET after a brief hold at T-40 seconds to address tank pressurization issues. Starship lifted off and slowly ascended from the pad SpaceX built at its Boca Chica, Texas, facility that it’s christened Starbase.

The livestream(Opens in a new window) of the launch showed(Opens in a new window) that six of Starship’s 33 methane-fueled Raptor engines were not lit, but Insprucker reported a nominal trajectory through the tricky period of maximum aerodynamic pressure (”Max Q”(Opens in a new window)) and almost all the way to first-stage shutdown.

But then Starship started tumbling end over end, first stage engines still lit. The rocket did not pull out of that spin and exploded about 24 miles up(Opens in a new window), either because aerodynamic forces broke it apart or because of a self-destruct command issued to ensure it would break up over open water.

SpaceX Starship explodes after launch for a flight test from Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas. (Photo by Patrick T. Fallon / AFP)

SpaceX had been working toward this day since May 2021, when it successfully launched a Starship upper stage on a high-altitude test flight that ended with a vertical landing of the vehicle. 

The two-stage, fully reusable(Opens in a new window) Starship will represent a giant leap in capability for SpaceX and for human spaceflight in general. With a maximum of 16.7 million pounds of thrust in its first stage, Starship can loft some 110 tons to low Earth orbit. And because it, unlike other rockets, is designed to be refueled in orbit, Starship can send just as much payload to the Moon, according to a 2020 SpaceX document (PDF(Opens in a new window)).

SpaceX sees Starship’s capacity as crucial for building out its Starlink satellite-broadband constellation, and NASA has signed up SpaceX to develop a version of Starship’s upper stage as a crewed lunar lander for its Project Artemis return to the Moon.

It had planned for this test flight to send Starship’s upper stage once around the world before splashing down in the Pacific Ocean, but the company had emphasized that having the rocket safely clear the tower and not destroy the launch pad (like the Soviet Union’s doomed N1 moon rocket(Opens in a new window)) would rate as a win(Opens in a new window).

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The early and explosive end of Thursday’s launch attempt pushes SpaceX’s ambitions back a little further and lets NASA’s Space Launch System, which successfully launched in November, retain its title as the world’s most powerful operational rocket.

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson tweeted his congratulations(Opens in a new window) to SpaceX for getting this far, writing that “Every great achievement throughout history has demanded some level of calculated risk, because with great risk comes great reward.”

And SpaceX CEO Elon Musk looked toward the next launch. SpaceX already has future Starship vehicles under construction, a fundamental part of its strategy of rapid iteration and experimentation. “Congrats @SpaceX team on an exciting test launch of Starship!,” he tweeted(Opens in a new window). “Learned a lot for next test launch in a few months.”

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