Will SpaceX explode its starship for the 4th time of the year?

Will the fourth be the right one? While the first three flight tests of SpaceX Starship since the beginning of 2025 have resulted in chess, Elon Musk persists: he announced that the next flight will take place within three weeks. It was on July 14, via its X network, that the founder of SpaceX unveiled this approximate date – which would therefore take us to the first week of August.

Since the first orbital test in 2023, the starship, supposed to be the largest and powerful world rocket, will therefore be in its tenth attempt. The context is not simple, because the difficulties have multiplied since the beginning of 2025.

Already 3 explosions of the starship in 4 months

In January, the Booster had been able to be recovered, but the second floor experienced a engine failure, which ended with its self-destruction seen from the Turkish-and-Caican Islands.

In March, the same scenario for the starship, with a second floor disintegrated off the Bahamas. And in May, the ninth flight of the giant rocket put aside the recovery of the booster to focus on the second floor … which missed the deployment of its satellites, before undergoing a fuel leak and dislocating above the Indian Ocean during its atmospheric re-entre.

Despite these failures, the company did not miss everything on these flights: the super heavy did well on the seventh and eighth, and the ninth was its first reuse – since it is the same booster which had stolen on the 7th. Elon Musk had even assured that this essay had been rich in lessons, and that the separation between the two floors had been perfect, which was already a great advance.

More in detail, this flight was an opportunity to test an original maneuver: deactivate one of the engines during the descent phase to test the performance of those remaining in the event of an unexpected. Also, the angle of the booster during the descent was higher, with the aim of reducing fuel consumption, but at the cost of greater stress on materials.

Despite these recovered data, and the optimism of its CEO, SpaceX is still on partial failures (at best).

A tenth flight complicated upon preparation

This tenth flight does not provide many changes compared to the previous ones. The goal is to recover the Super Heavy, to deploy simulators of payload (here, False Satellites Starlink), and to land the second floor. An ambitious plan in view of the preparation of this tenth flight, which has already experienced adventures in June: the vehicle exploded during ground tests in Texas. Which had caused big damage on the site, but fortunately there had been no victim.

These difficulties do not prevent the business from moving forward quickly. What it has every interest in doing, since the Artemis program counts on the vehicle for the Lunar Lunar Larry. Not to mention Elon Musk’s ambitions to conquer Mars by 2028 … which seems highly improbable, not to say completely unrealistic!

All in a context where the American Congress, as well as Donald Trump, seem to hesitate to abandon the SLS, the heavy launcher of NASA, in favor of SpaceX. This would be difficult to pass if the company does not show significant progress soon.