One of SpaceX’s Starship rockets exploded on a test stand in Texas late on Wednesday night, as the company prepared for the tenth test flight of the heavy-lift rocket system.
SpaceX said “all personnel are safe and accounted for” in a post on X, and claimed there are “no hazards to residents in surrounding communities.” The company said in a later update on Thursday that an initial analysis suggests the explosion was caused by a failure of of a “pressurized tank known as a COPV, or composite overwrapped pressure vessel” in the Starship’s nosecone.
The enormous explosion caused damage to the area surrounding the test stand, according to SpaceX. But the company said there are no reported injuries. SpaceX was preparing to perform a “static fire” of the Starship’s six Raptor engines, and so the area around the rocket had been cleared prior to the explosion.
It’s not immediately clear what impact this will have on SpaceX’s development of the Starship rocket system. A recent advisory from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) suggested the tenth test flight could have happened as soon as June 29. That will most likely be delayed as the company works through what went wrong on Wednesday night.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said in a post seemingly related to the explosion that he considers it to be: “Just a scratch.”
SpaceX has spent the last few years aggressively developing the 171-foot Starship and the massive 232-foot Super Heavy booster that powers it into space. The company started 2025 saying this year would be a “transformational” one for the program, and the FAA recently increased its limit on Starship launches in Texas from 5 to 25.
But Starship, in particular, has had a number of problems this year. The rocket unexpectedly exploded during its seventh test flight in January, and then again in March. It failed again during its ninth test in May.
While the rocket made it further into its most recent flight in May than during the previous two tests, it still failed to deploy the dummy Starlink satellites it was carrying onboard — a crucial step in the company’s plan to use the mega-rocket to grow its space-based internet service.
Musk has maintained that SpaceX is on track to try to send a Starship to Mars in 2026, giving it a “50/50” chance in a company update in May. The company is also developing a larger “Version 3” of Starship that, Musk claimed, could fly as early as this year.
This story has been updated with new information from SpaceX about what it believes to be the cause of the explosion.