Up in smoke
A SpaceX Starship exploded at a launch site in Texas Wednesday night, bursting into a massive fireball.
The Starship “experienced a major anomaly while on a test stand at Starbase,” SpaceX’s launch site in Texas, the company said on X.
No shit!!
Video from LabPadre, the company that monitors SpaceX activities at Starbase, appears to show two major explosions — the first near the rocket’s nose, and the second on the left side of the spacecraft. The Starship was being filled with liquid oxygen and high-energy methane fuel at the time the detonations happened.
SpaceX has launched nine Super Heavy-Starship test flights over the last 2 years, with the first three ending with explosions or breakups and the next three being partially successful. The next two resulted in explosions and the most recent flight, in May, reached its trajectory but broke up during atmospheric entry after spinning out of control.
Known as Ship 36, SpaceX was planning to launch the Starship around the end of this month on a huge Super Heavy booster, in what would have been the rocket’s tenth test fight. The explosion of the SpaceX Starship upper stage during a test at Starbase, Texas, likely incurred a cost ranging between $100 million and $200 million, depending on the specific Starship variant involved, the payload integration, and whether the test article was a flight-ready or subcomponent prototype.
Total Estimated Taxpayer-Funded Contribution to Starship: ~$4.3 to $4.6 billion
