We’re now halfway through 2025. Unless Starship becomes spectacularly successful in the next 12 months, I don’t it happening. 
I wonder if there’s a rabidly Musk-hating saboteur somewhere on the team.
Yeah, Starships going to Mars in 2026 is ludicrously unbelievable. I dunno, maybe that sort of hype is just meant to move the Overton window, of sorts, of investor expectations.
The idea they could send FIVE of them with a large payload in 2026 is exactly as believable as that they will invent warp drive and meet the Vulcans. There is zero chance of this happening. Zero.
I wonder if Musk’s drug-fueled imagination is beginning to fantasize that even if it’s not actually true.
They have a big lead but this statement seems to be hyperbole. There is at least heavy lift competition getting close.
There is the Vulcan Centaur rocket in testing phase made by United Launch Alliance.
And New Glenn by Blue Origin, also at test flight stage.
Neither would have as much capacity as Starship would but big enough for the bulk of a heavy lift demand likely. And both can advertise many fewer exploded ships than SpaceX!
The hare way ahead doesn’t always win the race. Something that reliably works may be preferable to something that does not.
“Test flight stage” is where SpaceX is at with Starship, which has a lot of folks in this thread unimpressed. Meanwhile, the Falcon 9 is comparable to the Vulcan Centaur, and is an established, mature vehicle with hundreds of successful mission launches.
Being at test phase isn’t what is unimpressive about where Starship is; repetitively failing those tests is. Every explosion increases the perception that a reliable Starship is ultimately vaporware.
I wouldn’t claim to be expert or even highly knowledgeable about any of this, but from what I can read Vulcan Centaur is aimed to do high orbit deliveries that Falcon 9 cannot. Heavy deliveries there is the need. And reliability for very high value payloads.
Especially since 5 ships to Mars means something like 50 successful launches and orbital fuel transfers
This was a test of the upper stage. The first stage wasn’t there.
I’m not disputing you, but what was the second stage standing on? A big pipe?
Which suggests this is even more exciting than I thought:
If a barely fueled second stage did this big a space kablooie, I can hardly wait to see what a fully fueled first and second stage oopsie looks like.
Ref all the vids, we see an initial explosion that starts up near the top of the fins and all but instantly envelops the entire upper stage. Then, a half-second (quarter second?) later we see a larger explosion centered lower down. What’s that?
Thanks ever so for that link. I’ve already spent over an hour of my life I’ll never get back scrolling through that, even without following the embedded links.
True, this latest Starship explosion is nowhere near the monsters cited there, but it sure was impressive visually. It done blowed up good.
If vehicles were failing while ‘pushing the envelope’ in some way that would be a legitimate and useful test where there would be information gained that would feed into design improvements, and (at least from Falcon 9 and Heavy development) SpaceX does an excellent job of integrating copious on-board instrumentation and excellent quality telemetry feed. However, most if not all of the failures of ‘Super Heavy’ and ‘Starship’ have turned out to be pretty basic problems with design and quality control. In this case, the ‘Starship’ vehicle was being prepared for a ground static fire of all six engines and apparently experienced a rupture of the LOX feed line or header tank, which would seem to indicate either a fundamental design problem or a significant quality control problem.
Given the criticality of this vehicle for HLS and the mass deployment of Starlink and Starshield satellites that SpaceX’s future revenues are dependent upon, having these kinds of failures repeatedly is problematic from a schedule standpoint even if there is a wide tolerance for technical failures and money spent on building up vehicles and repairing test facilities. Characterizing this a as a “business as normal” practice for a hard-charging startup (as many are doing) misses the point that SpaceX is no longer a startup and that the ‘fly a little, break a little’ approach is questionable enough with any hardware much less a test involving hundreds of millions of dollars and resulting in blowing debris across international borders.
The Falcon 9 can achieve higher orbital parameters (as the second stage has multiple relight capabilities) and has delivered GPS satellites to MEO and the DSCOVR Earth Observation Satellite to the L-1 point Lagrange point. Falcon Heavy launched a Tesla Roadster into a solar orbit. However, because it uses a hydrocarbon fuel (versus the LH?2 of Centaur) there are plume contamination concerns for satellites with optics or other sensitive instruments, and the Centaur Upper Stage has very high propulsive efficiency that might make a difference for certain types of payloads (particularly interplanetary) even though its throw weight to GTO is about 85% of the (expendable) Falcon 9, and very high demonstrated reliability in that application.
It’s way more than that. Even though SpaceX claims to be able to fully fuel a ‘Starship’ with 9-10 additional launches if you actually go through the analysis it would be a minimum of closer to 15, and that assumes close to complete propellant transfer and minimal boil-off when they have yet to even demonstrate any large scale fluid transfer on orbit. There are so many steps that are still needed to get to a trans-Marian injection that 2026 was an absurd figure to throw out as an objective even before SpaceX started blowing up rockets like they are celebrating a gender reveal.
There are ‘header tanks’ up top (used to ensure that the fuel lines don’t end up sucking on vacuum) and the LOX and CH4 are lower. Clearly one of the header tanks or infeed lines ruptured first, followed by collapse of the vehicle and rupture of the partially filled main tankage below. I won’t speculate further on cause or sequence but I have my suspicions about what may have caused the initial rupture.
Stranger
You just can’t see it well in the dark and the distance. These pages have photos from earlier tests:
Cool, but the thread is about Starship, the vehicle that’s supposed to be the backbone of space exploration.
The Soviets were very good at the rockets BEFORE the rocket that was supposed to take them to the moon.
This remains the last Tesla Roadster ever delivered.
But relevant to disputing my contention that Vulcan Centaur is a potential alternative to Starship for critical needs it is hoped to serve. If true that it won’t have much more ability than Falcon Heavy then that contention is untrue. And it seems like that may be the case, to large degrees anyway. (Thank you @Stranger_On_A_Train for the information.) I still don’t know if New Glenn may serve the need of an alternative.
Honestly I think I need to start with having a better understanding of what the market demands are expected to be that can make these ships a profitable concern.
Is the high orbit payload capacity of Starship really required for the next phases of space exploitation? Is it even desirable to have so much value in cargo delivered in one launch?
That was in response to a post saying that NASA should be looking at alternatives to SpaceX.
The 4th of Juli is in two weeks (for real!) time. Will SpaceX celebrate it with another 
event? Sure beats a parade.