Starship Flight 9 booster explodes on impact [video]
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Also really can't understate the importance of Starlink in the development program. Apollo jettisoned parachuting return capsules from the interstages so that engineers could get camera footage from inside the rocket during launch. SpaceX just gets an RTSP stream (or something similar).
There may be more things, but between those two I think the latter was a bigger problem. It would have gotten hotter and more physically stressed. And then weakened to the point to where re-igniting the engines caused it to fail.
They also used a new hot-staging maneuver, where the gases were directed out one side so that it flipped more rapidly in the other direction. It was a really fast flip! A rocket the size of a small skyscraper turning 90 degrees in just a few seconds. That could have jarred something loose, too.
Hopefully we find out in the post-mortem. SpaceX doesn't typically give the public as much detail as we'd like, but they're pretty good at sharing the high-level reasons why something failed.
It gives magnitudes more details than anyone else.
Explosion was probably expected.
Dang, that's actually quite insane.
Shame that block2/block3 starship is such a mess.
Of all people, I would expect him to know this sort of information ahead of time, although maybe the booster failure was planned but he was bummed about some some of the other things that didn't work well.
I don't think this flight reassured anyone that the Starship program is making the improvements we'd expect.
The second stage remains a huge concern. The economics of Starship are predicated on cheap, rapid second stage reuse. That huge multi engine second stage is a lot more expensive than the F9's disposable single engine second stage. Creating a robust, rapidly reusable thermal management system for orbital re-entry is an unsolved problem. I don't believe anyone, including SpaceX has a solution.
With time and huge amounts of money they can iterate through the other problems and likely do a controlled re-entry and recovery with the second stage but the vehicle isn't going to be close to reusable. It is a massive problem and I think it makes a fiction of the entire program and turns it into a money pit.
If you piece the system out though. The engines, the control systems etc, there is a lot of good stuff there for another system. I think the Mars colonisation BS worked well to inspire the troops and raise money and political interest but they seem to be in a corner with this design. It is looking very possible this system will never enter commercial service.
(The soundtrack was on the X.com stream, seems cut from this link.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUQgBPjGmAQ#t=35
AFIAK no one has ever done an exhaustive analysis of the provenance of all that stock footage.
This is an example of someone chasing it down. I don't think it's been done for all the Saturn V launches (Apollo 4 thru the last Skylab launch). That would be a big ask.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBITROWVcok
As a kid growing up in the 70's it was perfectly normal to see a documentary about Apollo 11 where they throw in the Apollo 4 Stage 2 ring separation like it was no big deal. The awareness of all these subtle differences is a recent development.
Unfortunately there was a fuel leak later that caused the craft to spin and made controlled reentry impossible.
However the program has been in development for quite a while (well over a decade) and seems to have a lot of internal issues. Be that poor management, scope creep, or whatever the process looks flawed.
No longer than other rocket programs. The speed of development is frankly mind blowing considering it's scale. Regulatory hurdles seem to be the biggest delaying factor. Which goes a long way toward explaining Musk's political activities AFAICT.
> and seems to have a lot of internal issues. Be that poor management, scope creep, or whatever the process looks flawed.
It seems like you're making the mistake of equating SpaceX's hardware-rich development philosophy (i.e. just fly it and see what happens) to NASA's check-it-ten-times-before-flight risk-averse methodology. Different approaches. Russia followed the former, much like SpaceX, and Soyuz is second only to Falcon 9 in number of launches. Arguably, more can be learned, more quickly, and for lower cost following the hardware-rich approach. You just have to deal with the optics and armchair rocket engineers declaring every launch a failure until they aren't.
The work towards booster landing and reuse was more iterative, but it was a special case. They had to be careful with the changes, because they were testing in production. The first priority was always delivering the payload. But once the booster had done its job, it was available for experiments.
Starship is the biggest rocket ever attempted, with uncommon propellant, most advanced engine cycle and it is designed to be fully reusable. Falcon was safe retreading of known ground comparatively.
It’s been in some level of development for well over a decade. Back in 2018 they changed the idea from using carbon composites to stainless steel and renamed the project Starship but in no way can you call it a fast process.
> hardware-rich development philosophy
If it was actually working it’s a perfectly viable strategy, but it seems to be slowing things down.
How long did the last fully reusable superheavy lift rocket take to develop? There's never been one you say? Right. So you have no metric for measurement. The closest equivalent: SLS is flying hardware who's design originated in the 60s, and Blue Origin began development 24 years ago.
Starship is developing at light speed by comparison to anything approaching it's size.
Still think it's happening slowly? Feel free to build one yourself in less time. I'll wait.
> the MiG-105 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikoyan-Gurevich_MiG-105 ) from 1965, and the Silbervogel project ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silbervogel ) from 1941.
Starship can trace its development back to the 1920’s seeing as the team leveraged that research, if you’re going to use such a meaningless definition including USSR projects as a legacy here Starship loses simply because of the much later launch date.
So you're not even aware of how the shuttle was developed and are just making ill-informed assumptions. Got it.
We can trace them both down to liquid rocket propulsion, but one flew in 1980’s the other is still in R&D.
Then why don't you tell us about it?
Because you’re obviously trying to deflect from a lost argument. Starship has clearly been mismanaged and nothing you’ve suggested has actually countered that core issue.
Even if I use your example and timeline:
Shuttle: 1968 (project announced) - 1981 (first launch): 13 years
Starship: 2012 (project announced) - 2022 (first launch): 10 years
Starship's several years ahead of Shuttle development.
Hilarious conversation. Thanks for providing laughs for the evening.
Yep, you’ve got nothing. Starship even borrows heavily from the shuttle program using a lifting body design etc.
At least have the dignity of walking away.
And note that the actual shuttle that was launched in 1981, the Columbia, went on to conduct 27 more successful missions (until its tragic end many years later). So it was already successfully reusable from its first test flight (with the known caveats around cost of refurbishment).
Only the orbiter was refurbishable (not fully and rapidly reusable like Starship - booster reuse was demonstrated today), which took 6 months, and cost $2 Billion per launch.
The whole Starship development program is slated to cost about as much as 5 Shuttle launches.
Feel free to counter the points being addressed rather than attack a straw man. Obviously if Starship was strictly worse there’d be no point in trying to develop it.
Suggesting a modern preproduction car is better than a Fiat Argenta from the early 80’s isn’t a recommendation, same deal with Starship.
No fatalities with Dragon yet, thankfully. It seems to me that Dragon and Shuttle are much more directly comparable. Falcon 9 throws away it's second stage, which is still less than Shuttle did. And Dragon requires a similar level of refurbishment to Shuttle. Shuttle could carry 27,000kg to LEO whereas Falcon 9 can carry 22,800kg to LEO.
Starship is slated for 200,000kg to LEO. It's in an entirely different class.
The aspect of Starship I find craziest - it's lack of launch abort system at this stage of development - was a problem Shuttle suffered it's whole life. And Shuttle didn't have the engine redundancy of Starship or Falcon 9.
Except SpaceX is spending ~2 billion dollars per year which on the surface is well below the space shuttle (though not that far), but modern aerospace projects have massive advantages over these early programs so simple inflation calculators don’t really capture the cost changes well.
The shuttle flew well over 100 successful mission including infrastructure that’s still in use ISS, Hubble.
Starship has 0 successful missions.
Relative to the less ambitious Space Shuttle and New Glenn projects, it seems to be progressing at good pace. They already demonstrated landing and reflight of the lower stage, and it does seem likely that they will land the upper stage this year.
Yeah, but it failed with more complex rockets (the soviet N1), where it just kept blowing up.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/apollo-moon-khrus...
> Korolev was not a scientist, not a designer: he was a brilliant manager. Korolev's problem was his mentality. His intent was to somehow use the launcher he had. [The launcher was called N1]. It was designed in 1958 for a different purpose and with a limited payload of about 70 tons.] His philosophy was, let's not work by stages [as is usual in spacecraft design], but let's assemble everything and then try it. And at last it will work. There were several attempts and failures with Lunnik [a series of unmanned Soviet moon probes]. Sending man to the moon is too complicated, too complex for such an approach. I think it was doomed from the very beginning.
So it is getting tough to say that Starship development is proceeding fast compared to other projects.
Not at all. We have a flexible hose for our tap and the hydraulic hammer smashes it good when you quickly close the water tap
The reason why I said it sounds counterintuitive is that I suspect that the flame extinction inside the combustion chamber also causes strong mechanical shocks. However, I don't know how that works and I could be mistaken.
I wonder if we will have a repeat for all of those problems when we get to Block 3...
Every single time SpaceX has set a goal, there were detractors who claimed they would never accomplish it. And along the way, there were plenty of failures that almost proved the detractors right. But every time--so far at least--SpaceX persevered and eventually succeeded.
When SpaceX decided to re-use their boosters, most people thought they were idiots. They would never be able to do it, and even if they did, it would never make financial sense. Even today, SpaceX is the only company to fly with "flight-proven" boosters, but no one is skeptical anymore. Almost every new launch vehicle, including several Chinese ones, are designed to be re-usable.
When SpaceX decided to build the Falcon Heavy, with 27 first-stage engines, many people thought it would fail. "Remember the N1," they said, which was doomed from the start because they could never get all its engines to work together. But the Falcon Heavy worked and gave us those indelible views of twin boosters landings.
When SpaceX decided to build Starlink, many people thought it was crazy. 5,000 satellites!? Are you crazy? How are you going to manufacture, much less launch that many satellites? Today they have 7,500 working satellites and they are literally launching more twice a week. Starlink has changed the communications satellite industry (there are at least 3 serious competitors).
I remember the first Starship launch, when 5 of its 33 engines failed almost immediately. Skeptics thought the Raptor engine was dead on arrival. Too complicated compared to the proven Merlins and way too unreliable to power Starship. They will never get it to work. And yet, in later flights, all 33 engines worked perfectly all the way to ascent. No one worries about the booster anymore.
When I first heard they were going to catch a returning booster at the launch tower I thought they were mad. I thought that was a long-term plan that might happen sometime in 2030, after they refined the system. But no, they went ahead and caught it on Flight 5. Since then they have caught two other boosters and have reflown one in Flight 9.
People who don't follow the space industry don't yet realize how revolutionary Starship it. It is not just the largest rocket in history; its crazy goal is to be able to launch, land, and then launch again with minimal refurbishment and minimal cost.
If all they wanted to do is launch something to orbit and discard the rocket, SpaceX could have done it on their first flight with a much less ambitious design. The reason it's taking so long (and will continue to take so long) is because their ultimate goal is something no one has come close to achieving: a rocket that can be reused like an airliner.
Musk once quipped that SpaceX is good at turning 'impossible' into 'late'. It's true that they have missed almost every single deadline they have ever set. But it's also true that the things SpaceX has done were once deemed to be impossible.
And that's why I'm rooting for them, no matter how many ships they blow up.
There is no correct answer; only preferences. I happen to like SpaceX’s goals.
Now if the lofty goals of enabling Mars and Moon habitation come to fruition, I would take a different view. For now I consider achieving that goal to be science fiction, but hopefully that changes in my lifetime.
It's a shame to me because I don't really give a damn about the guy, I just like space and think rockets are cool, but we have a situation where a potentially revolutionary rocket is being overshadowed by the CEOs antics to the point that people are rooting for the rocket to fail. It's tragic, in a way.
Musk's cuts at USAid have caused an ongoing humanitarian crisis and some 300,000 deaths, mostly children[0]. I think if you're coming from a neutral, utilitarian point of view then SpaceX's role in this atrocity outweighs any realistic estimate of benefit to humanity.
[0] https://www.impactcounter.com/dashboard?view=table&sort=titl...
What I don't know--because I'm not in the field--is whether that's because of design complexity (size, need for header tanks, etc.) or because the Starship team is not as tight (larger team, weaker leaders, distracted Musk).
Maybe both.
Landing and reusing boosters was seen as highly advanced tech, not at all conservative.
IMO economically, F9 + starlink pretty good business model. Starship + _____? It's not Moon or Mars. IMO once DoD gives SpaceX a few 100 billions in Golden Dome contracts, starshipwill start to seem much more viable / inevitable once it's fate is tied to strategic space weaponization. On topic DoD, let's not forget there's probably trillions $$$ of wasted technically feasible / moonshot prototypes from US MiC over the decades. Starship might end in that pile, but I'm optimistic it won't be, not because space but weapons in space.
I think the best business model is Starship + Starlink. Starship can launch a lot more and larger satellites than Falcon 9.
I wouldn't bet on other big Starship customers, defense spending, space tourism, Mars plans etc. Those are highly speculative. But satellite Internet has a clear use case and a huge market.
At about 0:39 a pressurized tank of something does a whimsical loop-de-loop into the plume of fire and it's hard not to feel like the little guy is just having so much fun.
https://www.spacex.com/launches/mission/?missionId=starship-...
Unlike YouTube, the X player is increasingly broken.
We don't really know, just yet, because there's no video of this, despite the headline implying that there's video of the explosion.
orbital mechanics puts bounds on where the parts that survive reentry will land (inside the declared danger zone).
And Falcon 9 is an unmitited success, to be sure. SpaceX basically owns the launch market because of it.
But eventually the chickens come home to roost and I really wonder if Starship will be the downfall of SpaceX. Let me explain.
Commercial space launches to LEO are SpaceX's bread and butter. There are over 100 a year now and whatever the cost of refurbishing used Falcon 9 first stage boosters is, I think the volume of launches (even if you exclude the induced demand from Starlink launches) has locked in an economic advantage for commercial launches for the next 10-20 years, in a similar way the 747 did for Boeing in the commercial aviation market. It's just that dominant.
But you have to ask what problem Starship solves. SpaceX already has a heavier launch capability (ie Falcon Heavy) but there's little demand for it. There have been 11 Falcon Heavy launches total AFAICT. So what is Starship going to launch? You might say that there will be new payloads once the launch capability exists.but we've simply seen no evidence of this thus far.
Starship is more complex, specifically the Raptor engines. You have two cooled propellants instead of one (because of coking with Merlin engines). In-orbit refueling is going to take so long to prove and perfect for some of the stated goals.
And Starship just isn't designed to land on things with a human crew. If a Starship booster lands on Moon (or Mars, which will never happen), your astronauts are 40 meters in the air. This is... far from ideal.
The US government simply won't allow SpaceX to fail. It's a national security issue. So I guess this doesn't matter. And it may be that the Falcon 9 cash cow props the company up from any number of boondoggles.
If Starship reaches its reliability and cost targets, it will lower the LEO payload cost per kg significantly but that's a lot of ifs and a ton of investment. But if you're not sending up a huge payload, you just don't need that. Starlink is fairly unique in being such a large constellation on similar orbits that you can launch them on a single orbit. Launching multiple satellites in vastly different orbits is not something a single rocket can do.
The starship program seems more likely to suffer from overpopularity due to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
Sorry to shatter your illusions, but Musk is SpaceX's founder, CEO, and chief engineer. He has a physics degree from Penn and was admitted to an engineering graduate program at Stanford but worked in Silicon Valley instead, where he made the fortune that he used to finance SpaceX.
Musk's biographer tweeted the pages from his book <https://x.com/WalterIsaacson/status/1844870018351169942> discussing how in late 2020 Musk suggested, then insisted against considerable opposition from his engineers, that Superheavy be caught with chopsticks instead of landing on legs like Falcon 9.
Also according to the book, Musk is the person who suggested and, against considerable opposition from his engineers, insisted on Starship switching to stainless steel instead of carbon fiber <https://x.com/richardprice100/status/1728106606616015097>.
(Hint: Musk was right and his engineers were wrong. Both times.)
PS - if you bring up Gwynne Shotwell, look up what a chief operating officer is responsible for (and not responsible for, relative to the CEO).
First, I couldn't care less what his biographer said. These aren't statements made under oath. The biographer isn't even a journalist. They're a propagandist. It's meaningless.
For many people, they think Elon is smart until he starts speaking about a topic you know and then you realize what a narcissistic moron he is. Like I already knew he was a moron but when he started talking about my area of expertise (software engineering), oh boy, it was way worse than I had imagined, specifically in the wake of his Twitter takeover.
It's endlessly fascinating to me how many people desperately cling to the myth of meritocracy, either because they align with the politics of the myth's purveyors or that they simply want to believe that their hard work will be rewarded.
A cursory examination of Elon's history exposes just what an incompetent moron he is. For example, his disastrous run at Paypal [1].
As for going to Penn and Stanford, so? George W. Bush went to Havard and Yale. So did Ten Cruz. Donald Trump bought his way into UPenn (Wharton, specifically). Roughly a third of these colleges are "legacies" or otherwise people buy their way in.
[1]: http://www.bhpanel.org/failing-upwards-the-story-of-elon-mus...
In terms of Elon's contribution, you couldn't be more wrong. It was Elon's decision to pursue Starlink - a business model that had bankrupted all previous companies that attempted it. Elon's decision to pursue reusability which made Starlink feasible. Elon's decision to fire all the upper management of Starlink when the program wasn't going well - and in under a year of that decision had completely redesigned satellites in orbit. And now it's Elon's decision to pursue Starship that is a money furnace, but if it pays off Starlink 3.0 could bring in an order of magnitude more money than it does now.
The same high risk, high reward methodology with a good dose of micro-management is how he's brought six distinct companies to multi billion dollar valuations. And how he's succeeded despite the incessant reporting of his or his companies imminent failure.
If you're correct and Elon is to be credited with these administrative successes, then turnabout is fair play in assessing his entirely unnecessary business strategies. Let's not fool ourselves into thinking Tesla would be undervalued if Elon hadn't bought Twitter. I heard the "underrated genius" shtick when Jobs died, and then every subsequent biography echoed his personal struggles and failures he hid to prop up his cult of personality.
Idk man, big picture, I see nothing, but success with the media focusing on just the speed bumps along the way
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/mar/19/value-elo...
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/08/technology/xai-elon-musk-...
- Ousted from Paypal for pure incompetence. Made money anyway from vested stock riding the dot-com bubble;
- Bought his way into Tesla then engaged in historical revisionism to paint himself a "founder". Tesla is a weird company because it defies any fundamentals. It seems to be valued between $500k and $1M per car sold in a year, which is just ludicrous. Tesla, as a company, has only survived by government largesse, be they carbon tax credits or the DOE loan in the late 2000s that saved Tesla from bankruptcy.
The only thing propping up Tesla now is import bans on Chinese EVs. Tesla isn't a car copmpany or an energy company. It's a proxy for investing in Elon directly. When Elon's relationship with the administration inevitably sours, Tesla's fortunes will sink as well. European Tesla sales have already dropped ~50% due to brand damage. The admin has cancelled an EV credit program that Tesla relied upon.
- SpaceX. This is a success. I still contend SpaceX succeeded in spite of Elon, not because of him;
- SolarCity. Failure. This became a recurring trend as SolarCity ended up owing a lot of money to SpaceX so the Tesla buyout was basically Elon using one of his companies to rescue another of his companies that owed a ton of money to yet another of his companies;
- Twitter. This one is hilarious because he completely overpaid for it. It seems like he was goaded into buying it by Peter Thiel and tried to get out of the deal until the Delaware Chancery Court forced him to complete the sale. By all accounts its lost 70-85% of its $44B purchase price. Elon ended up raising a bunch of money for xAI and basically used that to buy out his bad investment in TWitter, which for anyone else would be corporate fraud on a massive scale.
And what does Elon do all day anyway? Because it seems all he does is pretend to be a gamer and tweets nonstops. When does he actually manage any of these companies? In fact, his tweeting actually hurts his companies, Tesla in particular.
I'm honestly surprised there's still anyone who clings to the myth of Elon given all the evidence we have to the contrary.
Without that loan, Musk couldn't use his wealth to reinvest into SpaceX and also would have had a damaged reputation and credibility. SpaceX would have survived, but it's development would have been much much slower. You wouldn't have Falcon Heavy and Starlink, and Starship today.
So thank your government folks for creating both the electric vehicle market and private space market! Without the government creating these markets, there would be no richest man Musk today. So thank the ATVM program authored by Senator Stabenow and NASA's COTS program. The point here is to illustrate the huge amount of power the government has to pick winners and losers. That it is the government that creates markets to play in and money to play with.
If only there was some clear metric or way to quantify someone's business success... Hmmmm...
However, if Starship works, it will drastically reduce cost to orbit and become the workhorse for basically all launches.
We already know that — they've been very clear about it from the start. Starship is designed to get to humans to Mars.