SpaceX has confirmed that its third-gen Super Heavy Booster, the first stage of the two-stage Starship system, suffered an explosive gas failure of sorts during testing on Thursday morning. In a post on X, the aerospace company said, "Booster 18 suffered an anomaly during gas system pressure testing that we were conducting in advance of structural proof testing."
There was no propellant inside the booster as the engines were not installed at that point. No injuries were reported and the company shared that personnel are always kept at a safe distance during these types of tests. The company said it will "need time to investigate before we are confident of the cause."
The explosive release of gas, or whatever it was, seems to have blown out the side of the bottom half of the booster. Pictures taken by SpaceX content creators show this in detail. Clips of the livestream show the incident in question at around 4AM on Friday.
The booster is part of the third generation of Starship, SpaceX's enormous and fully reusable rocket designed for high payload capacity. The ship weighs 5,000 tons and towers over 400 feet in height (taller than a 30-story building).
Advertisement Advertisement
Advertisement
So far, Starship has had 11 successful launches at a cost of over $100 million per launch, and five explosions during testing . While this most recent explosion was fairly benign, previous incidents have seen fiery debris rain down from the sky. SpaceX's ultimate plan for Starship is delivering payloads to the moon and Mars. Most recently, the last iteration of the second-gen Starship had a successful test flight in October. This came after its first ever payload deployment in August.