The Spacex spacecraft is about to face its tenth test flight after the explosions in previous releases.
The CEO of Spacex, Elon Musk, has promised that the most powerful rocket and spacecraft in the world will one day will take humans to Mars and beyond. But before its tenth launch, scheduled for Sunday at 7:30 pm et, Starship has not yet achieved all its missionary goals. And the last three flight tests, plus a static motor test in June, ended in explosions.
“Now we have serious questions about whether the architecture of the stellar ship is in fact feasible or not,” said Olivier de Weck, professor of the Apollo de Astronautia program and MIT engineering systems and editor -in -chief of the Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets. “I am much less concerned about super heavy reinforcement. But the upper scenario, the spacecraft itself, I am beginning to have serious doubts about whether they can make it work. Certainly, with the payload they have in mind.”
A Spacex Falcon 9 rocket that transports the company’s Dragon spacecraft is launched on August 1, 2025 in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
Steve Nesius/Reuters
The tenth Starship flight test will leave the Spacex Starbase launch site in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas. The company has not yet launched and landing successfully the stainless steel space, which is being designed to be completely reusable and could take up to 100 people to deep space destinations.
Can Musk get your vision?
During a presentation in May, Musk shared his vision on how the stellar ship will eventually make humans be a fine, something that said it is necessary to guarantee the survival of humanity.
“The timeline measures progress to establish a self -sufficient civilization in Mars. This is how we are moving forward here in Starbase,” Musk said. “The reliable rockets quickly reusable are the key.”
Weck agrees that aiming at a human presence on Mars is an effort that is worth it, but believes that they will have to land astronauts on the surface of Mars and return them to the earth. He said that while the super heavy reinforcement of Starship, the first stage that raises the spacecraft to orbit, has been “quite successful”, questions the design of the spacecraft and its ability to bring humans to space safely.
De Weck said the company faces convergence challenges, an engineering concept in which the goal is for all vehicle systems to function together.
“Convergence means that with each test, each launch it performs, the above problems they saw in the previous launch have been addressed,” said of Weck. “The problem that Spacex has at this time with Starship is each launch, yes, they address the battles, so to speak, from the previous launch, but now the solution that made cause new problems that did not appear in the previous launch.”
De Weck described the process as playing “WHAC-A-Mole”, where each solution causes new problems that were not a problem in the previous configurations. This has been a challenge for the company on previous test flights.
Musk has recognized the challenges of his effort, writing in X that “there is a reason why a totally reusable rocket has not been built; it is an incredibly difficult problem. In addition, it must quickly be and completely reusable (like a plane). This is the only way to make life multiply. “
Problems with previous test flights
In mid -June, a spacecraft exploded on the launch platform during an previous flight motor test.
Spacex determined that “the vehicle was in the process of loading cryogenic propellars for a six -engines static fire when a sudden energy event resulted in the complete loss of the spacecraft and damage to the immediate area surrounding the support.” An analysis of the company discovered that the probable cause was the failure of a pressurized tank that stores gaseous nitrogen for the ship’s environmental control system, which triggered the explosion.
That explosion occurred less than a month after the nine test flight ended prematurely when the “spacecraft experienced a rapid unchanging disassembly” due to several mechanical failures minutes on the flight, according to Spacex.
The company also lost the heavy reinforcement in the first stage during the test after it seemed to explode while splashing in the Gulf. Spacex guilt “higher than the predicted forces in the reinforcement structure” for the loss.
Try the eight flight in March ended after what Spacex described as a “hardware failure” with one of the Raptor engines of the upper stage, which led to the fuel that turns on where it should not have done so. The company believes that the vehicle self -destroyed automatically. The rubble were seen by southern Florida and the Atlantic, which caused temporary land stop at nearby airports.
A similar failure occurred in January 2025 during the seventh starting flight test when the strongest vibrations of the expected caused a flight of propulsors, explosion and the loss of the spaceship.
In a subsequent report to the incident, Spacex said he has made “hardware and operational changes” to improve the reliability of the stellar ship and super heavy reinforcement during the next mission.
“Each launch is about learning more and more about what is needed to make life multiply and improve the spacecraft to the point that hundreds of thousands can finally take, if not millions, from people to Mars,” Musk said during his speech in May.
Can the ‘agile engineering’ solve the challenges of the spacecraft?
However, Spacex has achieved significant technical milestones with each flight test. The company returned the super heavy reinforcement to the earth twice, catching it with giant “chopsticks” united to the launch tower and reused one of them from a previous launch. The Nine Flight test also demonstrated the suborbital trajectory of the vehicle upon reaching the suborbital space before mechanical failures ended the mission. And with each subsequent mission, Spacex performs updates and changes in reinforcement and spacecraft based on learning.
Despite the setbacks, the company’s evidence calendar has remained aggressive, with launches often with only months of difference. That rhythm is essential for the Iterative Engineering process of Spacex, which WECK describes as “rapid prototypes or agile engineering.”
“We will find problems, we will try it quickly, and we will fix it as we move forward. And we gradually address a perfect product. That does not work so well for critical security systems and where the failure cost is high,” said of Weck.
For WECK flight ten, he says that the most important thing to see is what happens after reinforcement separation during the average mission stage.
“I want to see an adequate ignition of those engines, the Raptor engines in the upper stage and then a coastal phase, a cruise phase without explosions, premature motor off the engine and only a relatively clean re -entry,” he said.
However, even with another fault in the middle phase, of Weck does not believe that Spacex finishes the program or returned to the drawing board for a new design.
“I think they are going to move on to at least 15, 16, 17 flights. I don’t see them abandoning anything before 20 flights,” said of Weck.
As for Musk, his vision is a day when Spacex manufactures two or three spacecraft per day and sends spacecraft to the moon and Mars daily, if not every hour.
“We could be there among the stars that make science fiction no longer fiction,” Musk said.
