Space X’s big ambitions came crashing back to Earth on Tuesday, when its Starship made what the company calls a “rapid unscheduled disassembly” six minutes after launch, with parts landing in the Indian Ocean.
That puts Space X at 0 for 3 in 2025: launches in January and March both exploded, a bad start to what was expected to be the company’s most important year to date. They also coincided with CEO Elon Musk’s extracurricular work in Washington, D.C., as an adviser to President Donald Trump.
The ninth Starship flight had intended to launch eight Starlink simulator satellites, which are heavier than previous models. When a door failed to fully open, the 400-foot-long Starship, the largest rocket ever assembled, spun out of control due to what Space X calls an “attitude control error.” It then exploded.
Nonetheless, Space X CEO Elon Musk called the launch a “big improvement” over the last two and still plans to launch a Starship every month this summer. The company touted their latest attempt as the “first flight-proven Super Heavy booster launching from Starbase,” and concludes, “developmental testing by definition is unpredictable, but every lesson learned marks progress toward Starship’s goal of enabling life to become multiplanetary.”
After the January explosion, Musk was characteristically bullish on the overall event: “The booster flight was a success, the ship flight was 1/4 successful, hence cup being ~5/8 full,” he wrote on X, predicting that this week’s launch would “probably solve” the problems.
Starships are intended to be fully reusable. NASA hopes to use one for the planned 2027 Artemis III moon landing, and they will be necessary to facilitate Musk’s stated long-term goal of occupying Mars. The executive director of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Dan Dumbacher, testified before Congress in February that the complexity of Starships — which involve multiple fuelling flights — threaten both Artemis III’s launch as well as China’s 2030 planned moon landing.
Repeated explosions won’t help that timeline.