Staff Writer 
The mid-flight explosion of SpaceX’s Starship — its third consecutive setback — underscores the daunting challenges Elon Musk faces in achieving his lofty space ambitions as the world’s richest person pledges to scale back his political work in Washington to focus on his business empire.
When SpaceX’s Starship thundered off the South Texas launchpad late Tuesday, employees cheered the world’s largest and most powerful rocket’s ability to surpass the previous two flawed missions. But halfway into the flight, the stainless-steel rocket exploded after leaking propellant and spinning out of control.
While SpaceX had managed to refurbish and launch a previously flown Super Heavy booster — a key step to developing Musk’s dream of a rapidly reusable launch system — it, too, was destroyed before it could splash down in the Gulf of Mexico as planned. Even worse, Starship’s door failed to open and deploy the dummy satellites that were part of a crucial test of the company’s ability to deploy upgraded satellites designed to expand SpaceX’s Starlink internet unit.
The bungled mission raises major questions about SpaceX’s progress on Starship and casts further doubt on Musk’s repeated claim that the vehicle will be ready for cargo flights to Mars as soon as next year. It also highlights the risks involved with SpaceX’s iterative fly-fail-fix approach to rocket development and how far the company still has to go to ready the vehicle for operational flight.
If Musk was frustrated by the outcome, he made no mention of it, celebrating in a post on his social media platform X how long Starship flew and the strength of its heat shield.
“Lot of good data to review,” Musk said. “Launch cadence for next 3 flights will be faster.”
In a separate post on its website, SpaceX said testing “is unpredictable, but every lesson learned marks progress toward Starship’s goal of enabling life to become multiplanetary.”
Starship focus
As engineers begin to investigate what went wrong, a question mark hangs over how much time Musk will focus on Starship and SpaceX going forward.
Musk told Bloomberg News in an interview earlier this month that he had “done enough” in politics and planned to scale back his donations, as well as the time he’s been spending with the Trump administration. His criticisms of the Trump administration have also increased, with Musk telling CBS News he was “disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, not just decreases it.”
The billionaire’s proclamations that he’d spend more time focusing on his businesses sent Tesla shares soaring on optimism his moves will help mitigate some of the consumer backlash against the EV maker.
For SpaceX, a highly publicized all-hands-style digital town hall was planned for employees on Tuesday to address the company’s future and Musk’s plans for Mars. A livestream was set up, but the event never materialized online.
The Starship rocket is key to Musk’s lifelong dream of sending cargo and humans to the Red Planet and then bringing them back to Earth — and he said he would send a Starship rocket to Mars carrying robots built by Tesla as early as 2026.
SpaceX also holds a contract worth around $4 billion to land NASA astronauts on the moon as early as 2027. That makes it a key part of the US’s space ambitions just as the sector becomes a new front in rising global geopolitical tensions.
Designed to be fully reusable, Starship will be cheaper to fly than other rockets, the company says, and will eventually replace the company’s industry-leading Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets. Earlier this month, he told Bloomberg News he planned to get “Starship to be fully reusable so that we catch both the booster and the ship” this year.
But Tuesday’s failed mission underscores how far away he may be from that goal. In order to travel through deep space, SpaceX will need to demonstrate the ability to refuel Starship multiple times while in orbit and it needs to develop a life-support system. The company is likely looking at years and billions of dollars to invent the never-before-seen technology.
SpaceX will have the ability to launch more frequently from South Texas after the FAA approved the company’s request to increase the amount of Starship launches SpaceX can conduct each year out of Starbase from five to 25.
“We are trying to do something that is impossibly hard,” Dan Huot, a SpaceX commentator, told viewers on the company’s live broadcast on Tuesday.
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