SpaceX rockets keep exploding. Is that normal?

SpaceX mislaid interaction with Starship aft its motorboat connected March 6, 2025. | Image: AFP via Getty Images

With yet another failed Starship test this week, successful which the ambitious dense rocket exploded erstwhile again, you mightiness reasonably fishy that luck has yet tally retired for SpaceX.

But this grade of nonaccomplishment during a improvement process isn't really unusual, according to Wendy Whitman Cobb, a abstraction argumentation adept with the School of Advanced Air and Space Studies, particularly erstwhile you're investigating caller abstraction exertion arsenic analyzable arsenic a ample rocket. However, the Starship tests are meaningfully antithetic from the slow, dependable gait of improvement that we've travel to expect from the abstraction sector.

"The crushed a batch of radical comprehend this to beryllium antithetic is that this is not the emblematic mode that we person historically tested rockets," Whitman Cobb says.

Historically speaking, abstraction agencies similar NASA oregon bequest aerospace companies similar United Launch Alliance (ULA) person taken their clip with rocket improvement and person not tested until they were assured successful a palmy outcome. That's inactive the lawsuit contiguous with large NASA projects similar the improvement of the Space Launch System (SLS), which has present dragged connected for implicit a decade. "They volition instrumentality arsenic agelong arsenic they request to to marque definite that the rocket …

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