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20-06-2025
HAWTHORNE, CALIFORNIA: A SpaceX rocket has exploded before launch, sending a dramatic fireball high into the sky.
Starship 36 was preparing for its 10th test flight at Starbase, SpaceX’s launch site at the southern tip of Texas, when the incident occurred on Wednesday evening.
During takeoff procedures just after 11pm local time, the rocket exploded into a giant fireball.
The company described the incident as a “major anomaly”.
In a statement, it added; “a safety clear area around the site was maintained throughout the operation and all personnel are safe and accounted for.
“Our Starbase team is actively working to safe the test site and the immediate surrounding area in conjunction with local officials.
“There are no hazards to residents in surrounding communities and we ask that individuals do not attempt to approach the area while safing operations continue.”
It marks the latest failure for the space flight company which hopes that Starship will one day be used to ferry people and cargo to Mars.
Last month, a Starship test flight began spinning out of control about 30 minutes after its launch because of fuel leaks, meaning it broke up on re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere.
That followed explosive past failures in January, where a rocket blew up about eight minutes after take-off and March, which forced flights in Florida to be temporarily grounded.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said in May that despite the rocket failure, the test flight was a “big improvement”.
A day later, he said he wants to send a spacecraft crewed by humanoid robots on a voyage to Mars by the end of 2026.
Last month, Elon Musk had said he wants to send a spacecraft crewed by humanoid robots on a voyage to Mars by the end of next year.
The tech billionaire outlined his latest schedule for Starship in a video presented at the project’s Starbase home in Texas and posted online on Thursday.
The SpaceX founder had been set to give a presentation, called The Road to Making Life Multiplanetary, on Tuesday night, following a ninth test flight of the spacecraft earlier that evening but the speech was cancelled after the vehicle spun out of control about 30 minutes into the launch, having not achieved some of its most important test goals.
And on Wednesday, Musk confirmed his brief but tumultuous spell in the Trump administration as head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was ending.
Musk warned there was no guarantee he would be able to meet the Starship timeframe he set out and much depended on overcoming a number of technical challenges, during flight-test development, especially a post-launch refueling operation while orbiting Earth.
He previously said he aimed to send an unmanned vehicle to the red planet as early as 2018 and had targeted 2024 to launch a first crewed mission there.
Humans would land on Mars as part of the second or third flights, he said on Thursday but the first trip would be in the hands of one or more humanoid Optimus design robots built by Tesla, the electric vehicle and battery maker he leads.
The current target to land a human on Mars using Starship is 2028, but it has yet to make an orbit of Earth.
Musk said he wants to make it so that “anyone who wants to move to Mars and help build a new civilization can do so. Anyone out there. How cool would that be?” (Int’l News Desk)
