The Massey testing site, named after a shooting range that once occupied the property, sits on a bend of the Rio Grande River just a few hundred meters from the Mexican border. Currently, the testing site is the only place where SpaceX can subject the Starships to pressure and static fire tests before declaring the rockets flight-ready.
Earlier on Wednesday, just hours before the late explosion at Starbase, a statement from the Federal Aviation Administration revealed that SpaceX had set June 29 as a tentative launch date for the next Starship test flight. Now, this will not happen, and it is difficult to anticipate when SpaceX will be ready to launch a Starship again.
SpaceX has now launched nine full-scale Starship rockets since April 2023, and prior to the explosion, the company was hoping to launch the tenth test mission later this month. The performance of the Starship has been disastrous so far this year, with the three most recent test flights of the rocket ending prematurely. These setbacks followed a triumphant 2024, when SpaceX made significant progress with each successive suborbital test of the Starship, culminating in the first capture of its massive Super Heavy booster by the giant robotic arms on the launch tower.
The embedded videoclips below, from NASASpaceflight.com and LabPadre, showcase multiple angles of the Starship explosion.
Elon Musk mentions that the COPV nitrogen seems to have failed under its testing pressure, under conditions that should not have compromised the tank. “If further investigations confirm this, it will be the first time it has happened with this design,” Musk added.
The explosion at Massey serves as a stark reminder of SpaceX’s rocky path to bring Starship to this point in its development. In 2020 and 2021, SpaceX lost several Starship prototypes due to issues during ground and flight tests. The image of the engulfed ship 36 brings back memories of those previous explosions, along with the mysterious disappearance of a Falcon 9 rocket on its launch pad in 2016 under circumstances similar to Wednesday evening’s incident.
The extent of the damage to the ground equipment at Massey was not immediately clear, so it is too soon to determine how long the testing site will be inoperative. However, for the moment, the explosion leaves SpaceX without a facility to support the pre-flight tests of the Starships.
