SpaceX has made excellent progress with its Starship rocket. The stainless steel vehicle can now explode before even leaving the Earth.

The latest setback happened just before a planned static fire this morning. The rocket was fueled ahead of a test firing of its Raptor engines, but abruptly exploded.

The explosion occurred on a test stand, and it is unclear how much damage the facility sustained. According to SpaceX, "a safety clear area around the site was maintained throughout the operation and all personnel are safe and accounted for."

SpaceX boss Elon Musk quipped: "Just a scratch" several minutes before The Reg published this. We can only presume he was referring to Starship, though his Grok chatbot managed to ignore its real-time X access to suggest the comment related "to his recent feud with President Trump, given the timing," adding: "No evidence suggests a literal injury or damage to Musk or his companies on that date." Ahem.

The vehicle was being prepared for the tenth test flight of the full Starship stack; the 33 Raptor engines of the Super Heavy Booster had already performed a full-duration static fire on June 6.

SpaceX called the incident a "major anomaly." It has form. In 2016, a Falcon 9 abruptly exploded during a test at Kennedy Space Center, resulting in the loss of the Amos 6 satellite.

From video footage, the anomaly appeared to begin with a rupture or a venting event at the top of Starship before the entire vehicle exploded. SpaceX has yet to provide more details, and Musk has been unusually quiet on his social media platform, X. In May, he suggested that Starships might land on Mars in 2026.

NASA also depends on the vehicle to return humans to the Moon on the Artemis III mission in 2027.

The explosion follows three unsuccessful test flights of the vehicle, two in which the Starship exploded during the launch phase, and the last in which the vehicle lost attitude control and was destroyed during reentry.

SpaceX appears to have cut to the chase this time and blown up a Starship without bothering with any of that launching nonsense.

The vehicle concerned was Ship 36, which had already performed a single-engine static fire to demonstrate an in-space burn.

A US Federal Aviation Administration advisory suggested that SpaceX aimed to launch the Starship stack on its tenth test flight on June 29, with a backup on June 30.

At this point, Starship is showing signs of going backward. After making steady progress, SpaceX has suffered a run of three in-flight failures and now a catastrophic explosion on the test stand. It will be interesting to see what the company has learned from this morning's loss-of-vehicle event. ®