A test mishap on Friday morning with the first stage of the new version of SpaceX’s Starship rocket left part of the booster blown open and peeled apart, a new setback to a giant launch vehicle that has already seen its star-crossed moments.
Video of tests for the Super Heavy stage of Starship’s Block 3 design showed gases suddenly whooshing out of the lower third of the booster, after which pictures in daylight revealed a level of severe structural damage that no rocket in flight could survive.
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SpaceX posted on X Friday morning that this booster “suffered an anomaly during gas system pressure testing that we were conducting in advance of structural proof testing,” adding that the test involved neither Starship’s methane propellant nor its 33 Raptor engines.
“The teams need time to investigate before we are confident of the cause,” the post advised.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk had not commented on this as of 2:45 p.m. Eastern, instead busying himself online by hyping X’s Grok AI chatbot and Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” system.
SpaceX has historically excelled by being willing to risk things blowing up. It had two Falcon 9 boosters in a row explode in landing attempts before succeeding in 2015, and has since nailed more than 500 landings. Last week, it notched its 500th launch with a reflown booster.
However, Starship has not yet achieved anything close to Falcon’s reliability. Among 11 test flights to date, five ended with Starship’s upper stage failing to fly a planned suborbital trajectory. Starship’s booster had been the most reliable part of the vehicle, but Friday’s test featured the new, more powerful Block 3 variant, which has not yet flown.
“It’s hard to speculate right now, but this is definitely a setback,” Chris Combs, an aerospace professor and associate dean at the University of Texas at San Antonio, said in an email Friday morning. “Tough to know right now how long this will delay the next flight, but it will certainly cause a delay.”
He set this apart from SpaceX’s history of aggressively iterative testing. “It is definitely not the type of failure you would expect to see for a program this mature,” Combs wrote, noting that it was not supposed to stress-test the structure. “The Starship QC [quality control] issues are unfortunately starting to pile up, and the pressure is on with looming HLS deliverables.”
HLS is short for Human Landing System, the version of Starship’s upper stage for which NASA awarded SpaceX a $2.89 billion contract in 2021 (since revised to $4 billion) as part of its Artemis program to return American astronauts to the Moon.
SpaceX’s earlier delays with Starship—combined with China’s steady progress toward its own planned lunar landing by 2030—led acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy to announce in October that he would reopen the contract to build a lunar lander for the Artemis III mission that NASA now aspires to launch in 2028.
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SpaceX and Blue Origin (which already has a $3.4 billion contract with NASA to build landing vehicles for future Artemis missions) have since submitted revised proposals to speed up that first crewed landing.
Blue Origin Shoots for the Moon
Blue Origin, which last week launched its massive New Glenn rocket for the second time and then successfully landed its first stage on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean, revealed plans on Thursday for upcoming upgrades to the launch vehicle that will send its Blue Moon landers to the Moon.
In case it wasn’t obvious Blue Origin is shooting for the Moon, this rendering should clear it up. (Credit: Blue Origin)
The Jeff Bezos-owned space firm will phase in a series of improvements starting with the next New Glenn launch from Cape Canaveral sometime next year. That includes an increase in the combined thrust of its first stage’s seven methane-fueled BE-4 engines from 3.9 million pounds to 4.5 million, with the two hydrogen-fueled BE-3U engines on its second stage going from 320,000 pounds to 400,000 pounds.
In theory, that should allow New Glenn to send more payload to space from its current advertised capability of almost 50 tons to low Earth orbit, but Blue isn’t sharing details about that.
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Future New Glenn flights will also feature a reusable payload fairing that can be recovered after being jettisoned in the upper atmosphere, a cost-saving step that SpaceX adopted years ago for Falcon 9 launches.
Later on, Blue Origin plans to build and fly New Glenn 9×4, a larger version featuring nine first-stage engines and four second-stage engines that can send 77 tons to low Earth orbit and 22 tons to the Moon. New Glenn 9×4 can also haul physically larger cargo inside a 28.5-foot-wide fairing–much larger than New Glenn’s 23-foot-wide payload cover or the 17-foot-wide fairing on SpaceX’s Falcon rockets, and not much smaller than the 29.5-foot diameter of Starship’s upper stage.
In a post on X, Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp shared a rendering of New Glenn 9×4 that showed it standing dozens of feet taller than the Saturn V rocket that sent Apollo astronauts to lunar landings from 1969 through 1972.
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But the rocket that now looks most endangered by New Glenn’s planned upgrades is not anything from SpaceX but the Space Launch System that NASA flew in November 2022 and plans to launch again early next year on a crewed lunar flyby mission.
That giant vehicle—designed around upgraded versions of Space Shuttle components that, unlike the Shuttle, can’t be recovered and flown again—can send 105 tons to low Earth orbit and almost 30 tons to the Moon in its current configuration.
But SLS performs that mission at an astronomical cost; NASA’s inspector general estimated it at $2.5 billion per launch in a 2023 report. Blue Origin’s news makes it hard to imagine Jared Isaacman, President Trump’s renominated pick for NASA Administrator, finding SLS a viable way forward after the launches already in NASA’s budget.
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