Starship 36 Explodes During Static Fire Testing

SpaceX has spent the past month preparing for the tenth flight test of its Starship-Super Heavy launch vehicle. However, at 11:01 PM Central Time the night of June 18th, Starship 36 exploded on its test stand prior to a planned static fire test. Ship 36 was planned to be used for Flight 10, so its loss throws the immediate future of the Starship program into question.

The accident occurred on the Starship test stand at the “Massey’s” facility, part of SpaceX’s Starbase complex in south Texas. This stand was regularly used to test the Starship upper stage alone, without the Super Heavy booster. Ship 36 completed a single-engine static fire on this stand just two days prior, on June 16th, and a six-engine static fire is a normal part of Starship’s test campaign before flight.

While Ship 36 was fuelled on the test stand, propellant suddenly burst from the top of the spacecraft, which was immediately followed by a massive explosion that engulfed the site. Fires burned for over three hours after the incident and could be seen damaging ground infrastructure. In a statement on X (formerly Twitter), SpaceX acknowledged the explosion and confirmed that nobody was hurt. 

The extent of the pad damage is not yet known; the Massey’s facility is the only one that can support testing of Starship without its booster, so if the site is no longer usable, it may be months before SpaceX can rebuild the stand. Without this capability, SpaceX would face a long stand-down in its flight test campaign, or else risk flying Starships without first testing them individually.

Flight 10 was planned to fly as soon as June 29th. The loss of Ship 36 might have been expected then—all three previous articles of the Block 2 Starship design failed suddenly in flight, typically due to propellant leaks. But despite partially successful mitigations on Flight 9, a failure during testing suggests even deeper issues remain unresolved. Although Starship and Super Heavy have failed explosively many times in the past few years, the last time a failure like this occurred during ground testing was the loss of the SN4 test article in 2020.

Despite a favorable political environment at the outset of 2025, SpaceX has struggled to find success since then. All three flights this year—7, 8, and 9—failed unexpectedly well before reaching their stated goals. The shortcomings of the Block 2 design have time and again prevented SpaceX from making progress in their test campaign, likely weakening SpaceX’s political leverage in the U.S. The White House’s FY2026 budget request sought to eliminate NASA programs like SLS and Orion in favor of commercial options, a move widely interpreted as a key opportunity for Starship. Now that Ship 36 has gone up in flames, Starship’s power over Congress seems ready to do the same.

Edited by Nik Alexander