SpaceX has suffered yet another major blow in its quest to send humans to Mars. The company’s massive Starship rocket exploded in a fiery blast during testing in Texas late Wednesday night — the latest in a growing list of failures for Elon Musk’s highly ambitious space program.
The explosion took place around 11 p.m. local time at SpaceX’s Starbase facility in Brownsville, Texas. According to a post from SpaceX on Musk’s social media platform X, the rocket was being prepared for its 10th test flight when the incident occurred.
SpaceX confirmed that no injuries were reported and labeled the incident a “major anomaly.” Musk later added that early data pointed to the failure of a nitrogen storage unit — a type of Composite Overwrapped Pressure Vessel (COPV) — inside the payload bay. “If this turns out to be the cause, it would be the first time this design has failed,” Musk stated.
Video footage from the scene captured the moment the 400-foot (122-meter) tall Starship erupted into flames, with what appeared to be two separate explosions lighting up the night sky and sending debris flying.
This is not the first time SpaceX has experienced trouble with the Starship rocket. In late May, a test flight ended in failure when the rocket spun out of control midway through the mission, failing to meet crucial objectives. That incident followed a March test where Starship exploded shortly after takeoff, sending debris across Caribbean airspace and forcing dozens of planes to reroute.
Earlier in January, another Starship rocket disintegrated minutes after launch, scattering fragments over Caribbean islands and even damaging a vehicle in the Turks and Caicos Islands. Each time, SpaceX has treated the failures as learning moments — but the frequency of issues is raising eyebrows, especially as Musk continues to push forward with his Mars colonization vision.
Despite the setbacks, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has worked closely with SpaceX to monitor and regulate the tests.
Following the March incident, the FAA completed a required investigation and confirmed that SpaceX had implemented eight corrective actions to address the cause — a hardware failure in one of the rocket’s engines.
Even so, the Starship program appears to be stuck in a cycle of high-stakes trial and error. While Musk remains confident and characterizes some failures as “minor setbacks,” critics argue that repeated explosions signal deeper issues in the development process.
Starship is the centerpiece of Musk’s plan to build a sustainable human presence on Mars. The rocket is designed to carry heavy cargo and eventually crew into deep space. But as of now, the repeated failures are threatening to delay — if not derail — that goal.
SpaceX has not yet released further updates on the latest explosion, and investigations are ongoing.
