BREAKING NEWS: Starship Explodes During Testing // June 19th, 2025

Hello everybody. Welcome to tomorrow. We have some breaking news. Starship has exploded on the ground during tests late last night or early morning depending on where you are in the world. Ship 36, Starship 36 exploded during a static fire test. And they hadn't even gotten to the static fire part with the engines. They were doing just the fueling of the vehicle when this explosion happened. Let's check out the footage that was captured by NASA spaceflight. All right, let me play this. Yeah, probably. I mean, even the other day when they Whoa. Whoa. What? That dang it, man. This is not good at all. So, yeah. Let's check out another angle. This right here is an incredible angle from Dwise. Let's check this out. You can really see a lot of the detail from this. Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. And actually, let me just rewind just a little bit back to the beginning. You can see right there, we get a little bit of an explosion on the upper part. So, the upper tank of this exploded first and then in just a second here, you'll see that we had a second explosion, I'm assuming, as the rest of the vehicle hit the ground, which is what we're seeing near the bottom there. Yeah, there's the second explosion. And you can see that there's a whole bunch of propellant tanks nearby. And maybe SpaceX is actually incredibly lucky that this wasn't a lot worse. Although, Massiey's is going to be out of commission. Look at that debris flying. Oh my gosh. But yeah, Massie is going to be out of commission for a little while and it's unknown at this point how much damage was actually done to the equipment at the Massiey's test site where they do all of the static firings of the vehicle. And actually, I wanted to read this statement that SpaceX put out not long afterwards. On Wednesday, June 18th, at approximately 1100 p.m. Central time, the Starship preparing for the 10th test flight experienced a major anomaly while on the test stand at Starbase. A safety clear area around the site was maintained throughout the operation, and the important part, all personnel are safe and accounted for. Our Starbase team is actively working to safe the test site and the immediate surrounding area in conjunction with local officials. There are no hazards to residents and surrounding communities, and we ask that individuals do not attempt to approach the area while safing operations continue. And actually, here's a great example again from the Starbase cameras that NASA Spaceflight has of local fire departments. And yeah, look, just looks like firet trucks there that went by. But man, this could have been so so so much worse. But this is already horrible news. I wanted to show this angle again from Dwise, but this time it's at regular speed instead of slowed down a little bit. Yeah, debris definitely landed nearby. I mean, stuff hit those propellant tanks that are sitting there and thankfully we didn't have multiple explosions. I mean, we did have multiple. We had the two, but thankfully there wasn't a whole lot more. Yeah. Actually, I did want to show this. Uh Jerry Pike, also working for NASA spaceflight, shared these images, man. So, this is the morning after. It looks like most of the hardware is still there. Can we here? Let me share this tab instead. Let's see if we can't get a little bit closer on this. Oh man. Looks like it could have been a lot lot worse. Oh my goodness. Looks like at least one tank was damaged but didn't explode. I mean, you can see where there's damage marks on some of these, but didn't explode. And the rest of the area seems to be okay. That's a really, really good sign, actually. Uh, let me go back here because there was another image that Jerry Pike shared. Let me open this in another tab as well, and we'll take a look at this. Yeah, mostly the damage over there from where the explosion happened. So, thank goodness. This actually could have been a lot worse. Not thank goodness. This is horrible, but this is the only spot that they can do the testing for the Starship and booster vehicles right now. And actually, check this out. Uh, in a reply to Everyday Astronaut who said, "Wow, definitely came from the upper half header tanks area." Man, this is crazy. Elon Musk responded by saying, "Preliminary data suggests that a nitrogen COPV tank in the payload bay failed below its proof pressure. If further investigation confirms that this is what happened, it is the first time ever for this design, the V2 design, or is this like a V2.3 improvement at this point? Who knows?" This reminds me a lot of the AMO6 test back in the day where a COPV tank came loose and destroyed the Falcon 9 booster and the satellite that was on board. We see it tip over right there. Oh man, similar type of problem, although in only in as much as it has to do with the COPV tank if that is indeed the cause of the failure for Starship. So yeah, this is not great news and definitely a setback for the Starship program. They were hoping to launch flight 10 at the end of this month somewhere around or at least no earlier than June 29th. Something else that really gets me is that they had just completed a different static fire with this vehicle, only testing one engine to make sure that they could actually do the inflight one burn that they've been hoping to do for the past several flights now. I mean, look at this. Everything seems to have gone perfectly fine with this. It's such a shame they were making such progress. Although, this is certainly a delay and a setback. SpaceX is going to figure out what they need to fix and what went wrong. Hopefully, they take the time to do a thorough investigation while we have other investigations still ongoing for what happened on Flight 9. So yeah, this is really unfortunate. Obviously, they're going to have to do some repairs at Massiey's and clean up the area, check for any sort of damaged valves and pipes, and make any repairs as necessary so that they can test the next ones. They already have several other Starship vehicles that are in various stages of production. The booster for flight 10 is essentially ready. So maybe there will be a new combination of the booster that was already meant for flight 10 with a different Starship like the one that was meant for flight 11 and move that one up so that that'll be part of flight 10. Or maybe they'll just skip flight 10 and call it flight 11. I don't know. No, probably not. It'll probably be flight 10 still. I don't know, man. Maybe the V2 version is just cursed. In any case, hopefully more information comes out about this and we will be discussing this as well as other things that have been happening this week on our show this Sunday, which we'll be doing live. There's a lot of other really cool stuff that's going on right now that may seem boring right now, but is paving the way for some incredible things to happen. For example, the space divisions of Airbus and Taliselinia Space are talking about doing a merger, which would be insane. And on top of that, Blue Origin has signed an agreement with Taliselenia to do more missions and to work together on orbital reef. So, who knows what sort of crazy developments are going to come from both of those things. Also, NASA apparently got the leak under control at the International Space Station or has at least determined that it's safe. And we have a new launch date for the Axiom 4 mission which is going to happen this Sunday or rather late Saturday night, early Sunday morning depending on where you are in the world. Axiom 4 was supposed to have launched today and it probably could have. However, there were several biological experiments on board that um expired and needed to be replaced and apparently some folks from the Indian Space Research Organization, the Indian Space Agency and also the Space Agencies of Hungary and Poland were a little upset that they had to replace some of these biological experiments that are flying with the the astronauts that will be flying on Axiom 4 mission. So hopefully they get all of those replacements and everything is ready to go for this Sunday. Right now scheduled for 3:42 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time, which would be 12:42 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time, or you know, for the rest of us, that's 7:42 UTC. Despite these setbacks with the Starship program, Falcon 9 is still going strong. And again, this is a brand new Dragon vehicle that's flying for the first time on this Axiom 4 mission. So, still lots of things to look forward to and hopefully it's able to launch and there's no other delays and if so that it'll be handled safely and the mission will still be able to succeed. Also, check out this sweet new shirt I got. Yeah, I'm just a little bit of a Star Trek fan. Anyway, I look forward to hearing your guys's comments about this and how long of a delay that you think this is going to cause for the Starship program. And I hope that you'll be able to join us this Sunday for our live show to discuss this in greater detail and hopefully have a little bit more information about the whole thing by then. So, thank you very much for watching this video. If you enjoyed this, be sure to like, subscribe, and hit the bell so that you're notified anytime that we upload a new video. Consider becoming a member to get access to exclusive content and to help us produce more videos like this. Until the next time I see you guys, keep moving onwards and upwards. And don't forget, add Astra to the stars.