For years, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has been stridently glib when his rockets explode during tests, quipping that the blasts were “just a scratch,” a “minor setback,” or a “rapid unscheduled disassembly.”
He’s still deploying these jokey ripostes, but there’s reason to believe the walls may be starting to close in for SpaceX’s efforts on Starship, as more and more of the ultra-expensive spacecraft fail in spectacular public view.
The issue is that he’s bet the future of the company on the massive craft, making its success — or failure — an existential issue for his space venture.
First off, in a narrative sense, it’s the vehicle that he claims SpaceX will use to send settlers and the infrastructure to support them to Mars.
Those ambitions of colonizing the Red Planet remain, at least for now, essentially in the realm of science fiction. But SpaceX’s more pressing business interests also hinge on the gigantic rocket, which — if he ever gets it reliably working — will be the largest and most powerful spacecraft in human history.
One colossal issue, which affects not just SpaceX’s bottom line but the fortunes of the American space program: under its current roadmap, NASA is relying on Starship to ferry astronauts from lunar orbit to the surface of the Moon for its Artemis III mission, tentatively slated for 2027.
And on an even more practical note, SpaceX is also depending on Starship to scale its Starlink satellite constellation, which beams internet signals down to paying customers here on Earth. Back in 2021, Musk warned employees that “we face a genuine risk of bankruptcy if we can’t achieve a Starship flight rate of at least once every two weeks next year.”
“As we have dug into the issues following the exiting of prior senior management, they have unfortunately turned out to be far more severe than was reported,” he fumed at the time. “There is no way to sugarcoat this.”
There’s no way to sugarcoat the passage of time, either, because it’s now 2025 — four years after that dire warning, and to showcase the extraordinary degree of schedule slippage, a full year after Musk had originally planned to land astronauts on Mars.
In the face of those stakes, Starship’s progress has, so far, been dismal. Granted, the company has managed to patch together a series of imposingly-sized prototypes — but one after another, the spacecraft have met their demise in spectacular fashion, sometimes raining debris in epic streaks across the sky.
And if the optics are bad, the financials are worse, with Bloomberg recently reporting that the company is losing hundreds of millions of dollars in each of these explosions — which could explain why the accidents are starting to put Musk in a visibly foul mood.
Those eye-watering costs may also be contributing to a new sense of caution. The company was scheduled to test launch its tenth Starship test flight on Sunday night, but then pushed it back to yesterday, and then delayed it again.
In rocketry, though, hope springs eternal. The company is now targeting tonight for the risky test flight — though, at the rate we’re going, we wouldn’t be surprised if it ends up pushing it back again.
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