Posted on 11/13/2026 10:06:14 PM PST by Red Badger
SpaceX booster explodes (Screenshot via @CSI_Starbase on X)
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SpaceX’s Starship booster exploded during a test flight at Starbase, Texas, after the company aborted an attempt to catch it during a test flight.
The massive Starship rocket launched successfully, but the booster failed to return to the tower and instead went into the ocean.
The explosion was reportedly intentional.
Via @CSI_Starbase on X:
VIDEO AT LINK..................
Per Space.com:
Flight 15 lifted off from SpaceX‘s Starbase facility here in South Texas at 5:47 p.m. ET (2247 GMT; 4:47 p.m. local Texas time). The towering Super Heavy booster and Ship upper stage cleared the tower without incident and climbed into the skies under more than 18 million pounds of thrust from the booster’s 33 Raptor 3 engines.
The flight continued nominally through its initial ascent, with the successful execution of Super Heavy’s main engine cutoff and Ship’s subsequent hot-staging — firing its own Raptors during separation from the booster — about 2.5 minutes after launch. Following stage separation, Super Heavy reoriented for a planned return to Starbase as Ship powered its way toward low Earth orbit (LEO).
SpaceX originally planned to catch Super Heavy with the Starbase launch tower’s giant mechanical “chopstick” arms. But it wasn’t to be: The company called off the catch attempt and brought the booster down for a controlled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico about 6.5 minutes after launch, for reasons that were not immediately clear.
A successful catch would have been a significant milestone for SpaceX and its efforts to design Starship as a fully and rapidly reusable launch vehicle. It would have been the first successful recovery of a Version 3 (V3) Super Heavy, which SpaceX began flying earlier this year. The company previously recovered three of its V1 Super Heavy vehicles and reused two of those in later flights.
The booster was seen diverting course before detonating over the ocean.
“It looks like it’s not in the right position,” said NBC’s Gadi Schwartz just seconds before the explosion.
WATCH:
VIDEO AT LINK................
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Ping!.................
Crap, I was hoping for better results. I guess if you’re baking a cake, you have to break some eggs.
Poprockets.
That’s the Elon Musk approach. Rapid prototyping, with a quick but rigorous lessons learned segment to prep for the next installment, not years, but weeks later.
Anyone who gets on top of a rocket is insanely brave.
Starship is in orbit. The booster died. I think Starship is deploying version 3 satellites. At some point Elon will have a space centered super AI unit. His own private one. That will be interesting. Plus Version 3 satellites are way better data tranfer units than the version 2’s if I get this right. Quite the saga.
They had to self-destruct because it was not lined up correctly for some reason........
Analyze the data and figure out where and why it went off course then fix it..........
Yep. Get all the data you can and cut your losses. I think we’re watching Space eating an elephant.
I’m sitting in my man-cave looking at the November cartoon of Gary Larsen. Every time I get a new one I cheat and look at each month.
The headline sucks, makes it sound like it blew up on the ground during launch.
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