Why Does SpaceX's Starship Rocket Keep Exploding?

SpaceX wants to go to Mars, and it's built the rocket it hopes will get it there. This 400 foot tall monster is called the Starship, and it is the largest spacecraft ever built . As a two-stage vehicle, the booster — which is the lower section of the rocket, called the Super Heavy – has a whopping 33 of SpaceX's proprietary Raptor engines to get the whole thing into orbit. Meanwhile, the actual spacefaring vessel that sits in the upper section of the rocket is called the Starship and features a further six engines. What's more, both stages are intended to be fully reusable, flying back to home base to refit and refuel for another launch later.

It really is an incredible design. It just has one problem — it keeps on blowing up. Rather, it has many problems, all of which have led to it blowing up. The first Starship flew in April of 2023, but then blew up. Since then, updated designs have flown a further eight times, some of which have managed to successfully complete their missions. The Super Heavy booster has even flown itself back to the launch tower to be recaptured by its huge arms, which is a pretty astonishing feat. Yet, the last few times it's flown, it's blown up. So why, exactly, does Starship keep exploding?

With a few exceptions, it turns out that for the most part the actual explosions are intentional. By federal law, all space rockets must have a flight termination system (FTS) installed in case something goes horribly wrong. Basically, if you're going to try to launch a rocket into space, you have to strap explosives to it. There is no direct evidence this rule was written by an eight-year-old boy, but it seems plausible.

He's a smart boy, though, because the point of the rule is to detonate a wayward spacecraft's ability to keep propelling itself. Rocket trajectories intentionally go over the ocean, so if they crash, they don't hit a populated area. However, if it goes wonky and the engines are still firing, it could conceivably fling itself into a city, which would be very bad. The FTS will blow the rocket up before it lets that happen, and in so doing, will also burn up the toxic liquid fuel before it reaches the surface.

So when you see one of those incredible Starship debris fields streaking across the sky, that's actually (usually) by design. Something else went horribly wrong, but in such a way that Starship stayed physically intact, which could result in the rocket turning itself into an inadvertent weapon. To prevent that from happening, the FTS blew the rocket up, ensuring the debris field crashed harmlessly in the ocean.

Starship isn't blowing up for fun — it only does it once something has gone wrong. Over the course of Starship's nine flights, all sorts of things have failed. On its maiden voyage, the rocket unexpectedly created a rock tornado, causing it to spin out of control. On its seventh flight, it suffered a propellant leak, while on its eighth, several of the center engines failed. In both of those cases, however, the Super Heavy booster successfully flew back to base for recovery, at least.

The most recent (ninth) flight on May 27, 2025 didn't even earn the honor of a noble end at the hands of its FTS. In that case, another propellant leak caused the Starship to spin out and simply break up during the heat of atmospheric re-entry — an event that SpaceX likes to call a "rapid unscheduled disassembly." In better news, that was also the first time a previously recovered Super Heavy booster (from Flight 7) was successfully reused for a launch — although it, too, died during the flight.

Whether all these losses constitute failures depends on your point of view. This is engineering, where you often have to go through a lot of broken prototypes before finally getting to a solid design. SpaceX has a mentality of learning from failure and iterating quickly. Still, if the company is to ever get to Mars, it first has to make a rocket that doesn't blow itself up.