SpaceX Starship explodes third time in a row, Musk plans more launches

SpaceX’s Super Heavy booster and Starship rocket exploded during a test flight on Tuesday, the third consecutive setback for Elon Musk’s company.

Tuesday’s un-crewed mission was the ninth test flight. The system suffered prior explosions in January and March. Together, the Starship rocket and Super Heavy booster are around 400 feet tall when stacked for a launch.

SpaceX has been developing the Starship system to transport people and equipment around Earth, and to the Moon. Musk also wants SpaceX to use Starship to colonize Mars.

A livestream of Tuesday’s test flight, which ran on the SpaceX website and on social media, showed the first-stage booster exploding and the second-stage Starship spacecraft undergoing a major fuel leak, then spinning out of control and blowing up during reentry.

The Federal Aviation Administration said in an emailed statement on Tuesday that the agency, “is aware an anomaly occurred during the SpaceX Starship Flight 9 mission that launched on Tuesday, May 27, from Starbase, Texas, and is actively working with SpaceX on the event. The agency said there were “no reports of public injury or damage to public property at this time.”

Musk, who is CEO of SpaceX and the world’s wealthiest person, wrote on X that, “Starship made it to the scheduled ship engine cutoff, so big improvement over last flight! Also no significant loss of heat shield tiles during ascent.”

He added that “leaks caused loss of main tank pressure during the coast and re-entry phase” of the rocket. Musk vowed that SpaceX would increase its Starship launch cadence with upcoming flights at a rate of about one very three to four weeks.

SpaceX was previously restricted to five Starship launches per year from its spaceport in Texas but gained a key approval from the FAA to increase its launch cadence earlier this month.

“With a test like this, success comes from what we learn, and today’s test will help us improve Starship’s reliability as SpaceX seeks to make life multiplanetary,” the company wrote in a post on X.

SpaceX didn’t respond to a request for additional information on Tuesday following what it called a “rapid unscheduled disassembly.”

In addition to running SpaceX, Tesla and artificial intelligence startup xAI, Musk leads the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

Musk and DOGE have implemented sweeping reductions to the federal workforce, and slashed financial and other resources of federal agencies, including the FAA, Environmental Protection Agency and others responsible for oversight of the billionaire’s companies.

SpaceX has received more than $19 billion from the federal government since 2008 and is poised to take in several billion dollars annually for years to come, according to research by FedScout.

SpaceX and two of its partners are frontrunners to win a big chunk of President Donald Trump’s “Golden Dome” missile defense shield, Reuters previously reported.

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