<\/p>\n
A plume of exhaust after the SpaceX Starship rocket launched from Starbase, Texas.<\/p>\n
(Bloomberg) — When one of SpaceX\u2019s Starship vehicles burst into flames during a routine fueling test in June, the Elon Musk-led company decided it was time to bring in reinforcements.<\/p>\n
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Shortly after the incident, roughly 20% of the engineering group working on the company\u2019s flagship Falcon 9 program were reassigned for six months to Starship, a reusable rocket Musk hopes will someday carry humans back to the moon and to Mars, according to people familiar with the company\u2019s planning.<\/p>\n
SpaceX and Musk have a history of tackling engineering problems by throwing additional staff at them: Last year, Boring Co. staff were flown to Las Vegas to get its Prufock machine back online following water damage, according to\u00a0people familiar with the matter.\u00a0In 2018, employees of Tesla Inc.,\u00a0Musk\u2019s car company,\u00a0were flown in from across the country to California to help ramp up production of the Model 3.<\/p>\n
SpaceX Starship rocket explodes during test in Texas on June 19. <\/p>\n
The added muscle for Starship is intended to help improve the craft\u2019s reliability and individual component testing, as well as the rate at which the company can produce more of the rockets, one of the people said. SpaceX revealed in August\u00a0that a pressurized bottle holding gaseous nitrogen had been damaged, causing it to fail and lead to an explosion during fueling.<\/p>\n
The test-stand incident was the latest in a series of recent setbacks for Starship. In three test launches this year from the company\u2019s south Texas facility, two exploded prematurely, and a third failed to deploy its test satellites and spun out of control as it returned to Earth.<\/p>\n
Those failures have led to increasing questions about whether Starship will be able to fulfill Musk\u2019s aims. A New York Magazine story asked:\u00a0\u201cIs Elon Musk\u2019s Starship Doomed?\u201d<\/p>\n
SpaceX\u2019s impressive track record, including the construction of the Starlink satellite-internet network and its innovation on reusable rocket technology, has had a deep impact on the space industry and US space policy. It has also made SpaceX among the\u00a0most highly valued private companies\u00a0in the world.<\/p>\n
Since its inception, SpaceX has made highly visible test flights that sometimes fail in spectacular ways something of a calling card, with cinematic broadcasts\u00a0on X, Musk\u2019s social-media platform.<\/p>\n
Its process is designed to learn from failures fast. Yet Starship\u2019s recent struggles are revealing how rapidly updating rockets that cost hundreds of millions to make can lead to a cascade of expensive issues.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen you\u2019re changing lots of things in the design at once, all of those ripple effects start adding up,\u201d said Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who focuses on space policy. \u201cAnd it becomes more and more likely that you\u2019re not going to catch things and you will have a catastrophic failure during a test flight.\u201d<\/p>\n
Musk has made bold predictions about Starship. In his telling, it will not only be the first fully reusable orbital rocket, but orders of magnitude cheaper than any rival. Starship would also help meet his loftiest goal: bringing humans to Mars.<\/p>\n
So far, however, Musk\u2019s early projections that it would be safe to carry humans to space by 2023 and land people on the moon as early as this year haven\u2019t panned out.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s really one of the hardest engineering challenges that exists,\u201d Musk said at an event for Tesla owners in July. \u201cWhen we first started talking about Starship, people thought this was impossible. In fact, even within the company, we sort of thought it was impossible.\u201d<\/p>\n
Elon Musk continues to have high hopes for SpaceX\u2019s Starship pursuits. Photographer: Saul Martinez\/Getty Images <\/p>\n
The misfires haven\u2019t deterred investors. The 23-year-old company has continued to raise new capital at rates more befitting a keenly watched startup than a mature, capital-hungry business. Most recently, SpaceX has been planning a sale of stock that would value the company at about $400 billion.<\/p>\n
Yet there are also signs that for SpaceX to achieve a substantially greater valuation, investors may need to see more progress on Starship. During its latest fundraising effort, in which new investors don\u2019t participate, the company had discussed a $500 billion valuation, before lowering it after consultation with backers, people familiar with the matter said.<\/p>\n
Much will hinge on what happens next. The company is aiming to launch its tenth test flight of Starship as early as Aug. 24.\u00a0 It’s possible that SpaceX will be able to continue to absorb more testing failures, but the perception that the company is moving forward in Starship development will be key to their long-term investment success and fulfilling\u00a0contractual agreements with NASA.<\/p>\n
Starship Scramble<\/p>\n
Starship is one large piece of a growing web of programs that make up the SpaceX business plan. The company began with its Falcon rocket program and added the Dragon\u00a0capsule\u00a0to deliver cargo and people to space. Now, the majority of its revenue comes from Starlink, which relies on a massive system of satellites in low-Earth orbit that beam broadband internet to Earth.<\/p>\n
To make Starship work, SpaceX is betting that it can draw resources away from its core rocket program at a time when the company faces weak competition. Some planned launches of SpaceX\u2019s Starlink satellites on Falcon 9 rockets would potentially be pushed from the end of this year to early 2026 because of the surge of Falcon engineers working on Starship, the people familiar with the company\u2019s planning said.<\/p>\n
SpaceX currently has about 8,000 Starlink satellites aloft, and removing a few launches from the manifest this year wasn\u2019t seen as a show-stopping problem, the people said.<\/p>\n
Maintaining Starlink\u2019s robust financial health is important for SpaceX to absorb Starship\u2019s costs. Building one of the rockets \u2014\u00a0comprised of the Starship spacecraft and Super Heavy booster \u2014\u00a0costs hundreds of millions of dollars, the people said.<\/p>\n
When one flight fails, the full cost of the lost vehicle falls on SpaceX,\u00a0they added. The company is on the hook for other costs, too, including any environmental damage caused when failed rockets tumble back to Earth.<\/p>\n
Getting Starship right is critical to SpaceX\u2019s future. Eventually, Starship would be used to launch larger, more powerful Starlink satellites into space. Over time, the company plans to phase out the Falcon 9, making Starship its workhorse rocket, company executives have said.\u00a0And above all, Starship is meant to be the primary vehicle to start a base on Mars \u2014 the reason that Musk has said he created SpaceX in the first place.<\/p>\n
A SpaceX representative\u00a0didn\u2019t respond to a request\u00a0for comment.<\/p>\n
Employees survey SpaceX Starship ahead of its launch at Boca Chica beach in March, 2025. Photographer: Brandon Bell\/Getty Images <\/p>\n
Moon Landing<\/p>\n
SpaceX maintains that Starship will be landing people on the moon within the next few years. NASA has awarded SpaceX contracts worth roughly $4 billion to use Starship to shuttle astronauts to the lunar surface.<\/p>\n
To live up to that bargain, SpaceX will need to demonstrate the ability to refuel\u00a0Starship more than a dozen times in orbit with back-to-back flights. That maneuver has never been performed anywhere near the scale SpaceX needs \u2014\u00a0and Starship has not yet completed a full orbit of the Earth.<\/p>\n
The pressure to move quickly has affected decisions about the design of the rocket, according to a person familiar with the process who wasn\u2019t authorized to speak publicly\u00a0about SpaceX\u2019s decision-making.\u00a0For recent tests, SpaceX has used a Starship prototype known as Version 2, or V2. A few of the design decisions for this version have been made in an attempt to save time and money, the person said.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a type of risk that SpaceX and Musk like to take, but the consequences of these choices can have cascading explosive effects, which in turn\u00a0have an impact on public perception.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don’t think anything that\u2019s happened with Starship invalidates SpaceX’s approach,\u201d Carissa Christensen, founder and CEO of BryceTech, a space analytics and consulting firm, said. \u201cThat said, the persistent failures over multiple tests are happening in a context of One: high visibility. Two: a company that typically moves very fast and very successfully on innovation and Three: in a world where programmatic objectives depend on this vehicle,\u201d notably NASA\u2019s moon mission.<\/p>\n
The frenetic pace of Starship\u2019s development may also be a contributing factor to its missteps, with quickly implemented changes sometimes having unforeseen effects on other parts of the vehicle. For instance, a seal on the vehicle\u2019s Raptor engines began to fail after SpaceX started adding more propellant on later flights,\u00a0according to\u00a0a person briefed on the matter who was not authorized to discuss the program’s inner workings publicly.<\/p>\n
Many engineers at SpaceX continue to operate under the philosophy that every launch is a learning opportunity and that it\u2019s better to fail prematurely and often than wait years to execute a perfect flight. That thinking has been nurtured by the company\u2019s large resources and continuing access to vast sums of capital.<\/p>\n
SpaceX is known to be \u201chardware rich,\u201d meaning that it is consistently producing\u00a0multiple rocket prototypes that are available to test and tweak. It is committed to testing its remaining inventory of V2 Starships despite a consensus\u00a0 at the company that the design is subpar, according to people familiar with the matter. Engineers think there are lessons to learn from launching the rest of the V2s, the people said.<\/p>\n
Above all, engineers need to get better data from Starship\u2019s heat shield tiles to help perfect the vehicle\u2019s reusability.The tiles\u00a0haven\u2019t returned intact during any flights this year.<\/p>\n
This year, the White House proposed phasing out the Space Launch System, a massive rocket built by Boeing Co.,\u00a0after is third flight. The White House argued that SLS was overbudget and inefficient, and that it should be eventually replaced with commercial alternatives, with SpaceX’s Starship an implied option. Ultimately, Senator Ted Cruz included more money for\u00a0Space Launch System\u2019s fourth and fifth flights after Starship\u2019s setbacks sowed doubt that it would be ready to replace the Boeing-made vehicle in the near future.<\/p>\n
SpaceX has repeatedly proven to its naysayers that it can master what was once considered near-impossible engineering. Now, it needs to regain the confidence of doubters who fear that the company might be stuck in the mud.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe number one thing is visible, demonstrable progress,\u201d Christensen said. \u201cI think that\u2019s going to go a long way toward not creating negative perceptions. And the optimal outcome from that standpoint would be that they successfully reach space with a Starship return.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
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\u00a92025 Bloomberg L.P.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A plume of exhaust after the SpaceX Starship rocket launched from Starbase, Texas. (Bloomberg) — When one of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":83801,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[49,48,3284,66,306,50142,50143],"class_list":{"0":"post-83800","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-musk","11":"tag-science","12":"tag-space","13":"tag-spacex-starship","14":"tag-starship-spacecraft"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83800","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=83800"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83800\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/83801"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=83800"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=83800"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=83800"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}