Starship Glitches for 3rd Consecutive Flight, Setback for Elon Musk

Elon Musk’s most ambitious project spun out of control before his eyes once again.

SpaceX’s Starship mega-rocket launched from its Texas facility on Tuesday evening to make an ill-fated third attempt at a huge milestone: releasing its first payload into orbit.

That’s the key to Starship bringing in the big bucks to fund Musk’s visions of building a city on Mars. To garner paying customers, Starship has to show it can deliver.

The first step is releasing a batch of eight mock Starlink satellites into orbit. SpaceX tried to do this twice already — in January and March — only to see Starship explode before it could even try opening its payload doors.

Tuesday’s flight didn’t fare much better. The rocket thundered through the skies to reach space in one piece, but when it came time to release its practice satellites, the payload door would not open. It’s not yet clear what caused that first mishap.

The hosts on the SpaceX livestream emphasized that the more important test was the vehicle’s reentry into orbit, because SpaceX has removed 100 of the spaceship’s protective heat-shield tiles to test its limits.

A few minutes later, though, that test went out the window too when Starship starting spinning as it cruised above Earth.

“We did spring a leak in some of the fuel tank systems inside Starship,” Dan Huot, a SpaceX communications manager, said on the SpaceX livestream.

He added that, with no control over the spaceship’s orientation, it was unlikely SpaceX would be able to test the heat shield. Rather, it would fall uncontrolled into the Indian Ocean, probably breaking apart on the way down.

This is Starship’s third consecutive problem flight. After being on a promising upward trajectory for nearly two years, SpaceX’s vanguard rocket program has backslid.

Starship could supercharge the space industry

As a super-heavy-lift vehicle, Starship’s appeal to the space industry is its massive power. It can haul giant payloads into space, but that’s not worth much if it can’t release them into orbit.

The Starship-Super Heavy launch system — consisting of the lower-stage Super Heavy booster and upper-stage Starship rocket — promises to be the largest, most powerful, and first-ever fully reusable orbital rocket on Earth.

If it succeeds, some experts and Musk have said it could help cut the cost of spaceflight by an order of magnitude.

Musk’s interplanetary visions and SpaceX’s long-term business plan aren’t the only futures on the line. The heft and savings that Starship promises could revolutionize spaceflight and accelerate the space industry at large.

Want to build giant hotels in Earth’s orbit? Want to mine the moon or asteroids for rare minerals? Want to set up a radio telescope on the far side of the moon? You’ll need to haul a lot of stuff into space. The up-front costs will be high, so you’ll need to do it for cheap. Enter Starship.

“In order to have a sustained economy around the moon, I think we need a heavy lift launch vehicle,” Steve Altemus, the CEO of Intuitive Machines, which has landed two robotic missions on the moon, previously told Business Insider.

Starship has failed 3 times in 2025

Starship is still in its testing and development stage, but it has made major strides toward commercial flight.

The rocket has flown to space multiple times. Starship has returned in one piece and landed in the ocean with its engines firing — a crucial demonstration before it can try landing on the ground. Its Super Heavy booster even landed smoothly on its launch tower three times.

Starship’s luck changed in January, though, when the rocket was first set to attempt a mock satellite deployment.

As it soared toward space, the upper-stage Starship exploded and rained down huge chunks of debris in the Caribbean, causing the Federal Aviation Administration to divert aircraft in the area and triggering an investigation.

SpaceX determined that the propulsion system’s hardware had suffered more stress than expected during the flight, causing fuel leaks and fire in the ship’s “attic area.”

The company made upgrades to better vent the attic area, got reapproval from the FAA, and flew again in March — only to watch Starship explode again.

On that flight, the vehicle reached space and quickly spun out of control, eventually tumbling back toward Earth and blowing up.

In that instance, too, the FAA briefly grounded flights across Florida’s east coast to avoid raining rocket debris.

According to SpaceX, the ensuing investigation found that a “hardware failure” in one of the ship’s Raptor engines had probably allowed its highly reactive propellants to mix and ignite, disabling all the engines. To fix that problem, the company says it improved the engines’ plumbing and key joints.

SpaceX said on X that the March flight was “a reminder of the value of putting hardware into a real-world environment as frequently as possible.”

It could be weeks or months before SpaceX shares a verdict on what caused Tuesday’s mishap. Starship probably won’t launch again until then.