“Kaboom” is not the sound you want a rocket ship to make, as a rule. Yet that’s the problem facing the private aerospace company SpaceX and its leader, Elon Musk. Instead of going to space, their newest rocket ship keeps going kaboom.
The last three flights of Starship, a two-stage, 400-foot tall behemoth, ended in fiery disaster—what Musk has sometimes jokingly called a “rapid unplanned disassembly.” In January and again in March the launch vehicle’s Super Heavy booster stage made it back to a massive, pincer-equipped gantry, but Starship’s upper stage didn’t. In May the booster exploded just before splashdown, and Starship broke up spectacularly in the atmosphere, raining debris that commercial aircraft had to dodge. As a bonus, in June the upper stage detonated on the launchpad while Starship was getting fueled for a test firing of its engines. The tally for 2025 thus far is: explosions, four; SpaceX, zero.
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