SpaceX lost another upper stage of its giant Starship rocket in an explosion—without getting it off the ground first.

This loss occurred at 11:02 p.m. Central time on Wednesday during preparations for a “static fire” test. It was a precursor to a planned tenth test flight of Starship in which that stage’s six Raptor engines would light while the rocket stayed strapped to the ground. As SpaceX was still fueling the stage on a testing stand near its Starbase, Texas, complex, the rocket exploded.

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“Whoah!” NASASpaceflight commentators Sawyer Rosenstein and Max Evans blurted out together on the space news-and-commentary site’s YouTube livestream. The video feed went white for a moment before showing secondary explosions that sent Starship shrapnel into the sky and engulfed the test stand. 

SpaceX posted soon after on X to report “a major anomaly” with no harm to the company’s people. The test stand, on the Rio Grande at the US-Mexico border, stands several miles apart from SpaceX’s facilities and its Starship launch tower overlooking the Gulf of Mexico.

“A safety clear area around the site was maintained throughout the operation and all personnel are safe and accounted for,” the post read in part. “Our Starbase team is actively working to safe the test site and the immediate surrounding area in conjunction with local officials.”

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk reacted with brief sarcasm in a post on X Thursday morning; “Just a scratch,” he wrote. But he provided more detail in a subsequent reply to a post from Tim Dodd, founder of the Everyday Astronaut site.

“Preliminary data suggests that a nitrogen COPV in the payload bay failed below its proof pressure,” Musk wrote. “If further investigation confirms that this is what happened, it is the first time ever for this design.”

Not the First COPV Malfunction

COPV is short for “composite overwrapped pressure vessel,” a type of tank built out of lightweight composites woven around a metal lining. Having the design on Starship’s upper stage fail this way may be new, but SpaceX has seen a COPV malfunction destroy a rocket during a static-fire test before.

In September 2016, a Falcon 9 rocket on a pad at Cape Canaveral, Florida, suddenly exploded, destroying a communications satellite that Facebook had ordered up to provide connectivity to Africa. 

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Months of troubleshooting—diverted somewhat by Musk demanding that SpaceX, the FAA, and the FBI check out his theory that a sniper for SpaceX’s far-more-established rival United Launch Alliance had taken out the rocket—revealed that the cause was a helium COPV inside the rocket’s liquid-oxygen tank buckling under pressure.

SpaceX fixed that problem with a stronger COPV design, and the Falcon 9 has gone on to become one of the most reliable rockets ever made. The company completed its 75th launch just this year of that partly reusable rocket on Wednesday morning, a liftoff from Cape Canaveral that delivered yet another set of Starlink broadband satellites to bring the total sent to orbit past 9,000. 

(Meta, meanwhile, went on to shelve its ambitions to connect the world like many other once-vaunted Facebook features; in December 2022, the company shut down its Connectivity division.)

Musk’s Starship Ambitions in Jeopardy?

Starship’s design, however, owes little to Falcon 9: SpaceX is aiming for complete and rapid reusability of both stages of this 404-foot-tall-rocket, with sufficient payload capacity to send large missions to Moon and Mars after orbital refueling from one upper stage to another. But the company has yet to put a Starship second stage in orbit over nine launches that began inauspiciously with an April 2023 test that ended with the first and second stages exploding 24 miles up.

Starship’s fifth and sixth test flights last year looked more promising, with the first stage’s 33 Raptor engines putting the second stage on a suborbital trajectory that ended with a soft landing in the Indian Ocean. 

But the redesigned upper stage SpaceX debuted this year now looks more than a little snakebit. The seventh and eighth test flights in January and March ended with it exploding during its climb to space, and the ninth flight test last month went awry when the upper stage spun out of control after engine cut-off and then disintegrated during reentry.

This latest failure threatens Musk’s ambitions to scale up Starlink launches by using Starship to loft dozens of more powerful “v3” satellites at a time. It also jeopardizes NASA’s plans to use a version of Starship’s second stage as a crewed lunar lander for its Artemis missions to the Moon, for which the space agency awarded SpaceX a $2.89 billion contract in 2021. 

That project requires a series of flights to prove the safety of SpaceX’s Human Landing System design and validate its orbital-fueling plan, and that test campaign now faces a new round of delays. 

Unfortunately, NASA’s plan B, a $3.4 billion contract awarded to Blue Origin in 2023 to develop a second lunar lander to fly on that firm’s New Glenn rocket, doesn’t look much closer, with that large launch vehicle having flown only once so far. The next administrator of NASA—an unknown after President Trump surprised almost the entire space community by withdrawing the Musk-endorsed nomination of private astronaut and payments billionaire Jared Isaacman last month—may not enjoy this part of the job at all.

About Rob Pegoraro

Contributor

Rob Pegoraro writes about interesting problems and possibilities in computers, gadgets, apps, services, telecom, and other things that beep or blink. He’s covered such developments as the evolution of the cell phone from 1G to 5G, the fall and rise of Apple, Google’s growth from obscure Yahoo rival to verb status, and the transformation of social media from CompuServe forums to Facebook’s billions of users. Pegoraro has met most of the founders of the internet and once received a single-word email reply from Steve Jobs.

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