Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok experienced its latest meltdown this week, telling users that the mercurial CEO is more athletic than basketball superstar LeBron James and rivals Leonardo da Vinci in intelligence.
But when it comes to launching rockets, the entrepreneur is struggling to live up to Grok’s outrageous flattery. Right on the heels of the glazing, Musk’s space company SpaceX suffered a major setback on Friday morning when a next-generation Starship booster prototype exploded during testing.
As Ars Technica‘s Eric Berger reports, the incident occurred at the company’s Massey test site several miles away from its “Starbase” testing facilities in South Texas. A livestream shows the booster exploding at around 4:04 am local time.
Booster 18 seems to have just exploded during testing at the Massey outpost. pic.twitter.com/fmVdYPmWvA
— LabPadre Space (@LabPadre) November 21, 2025
In a statement posted to X several hours later, SpaceX admitted that “Booster 18 suffered an anomaly during gas system pressure testing that we were conducting in advance of structural proof testing.”
“No propellant was on the vehicle, and engines were not yet installed,” the company wrote. “The teams need time to investigate before we are confident of the cause.”
While there were fortunately no injuries, the latest explosion is yet another setback for the company that’s now markedly falling behind its enormously ambitious timeline to realize its super-heavy launch system. Starship’s development has already led to over a dozen powerful explosions, a controversial iterative design philosophy that has drawn plenty of skepticism.
The company is still hoping to safely ferry astronauts down to the lunar surface as part of NASA’s Artemis 3 mission, a mere two years from now. Before then, SpaceX will have to complete on-orbit refueling tests, the first of which is slated for the latter half of 2026.
“From an outside perspective, before this most recent failure, that timeline already seemed to be fairly optimistic,” Berger wrote for Ars.
Booster 18 was the first Version 3 Starship designed to test a litany of upgrades and design fixes. Version 2 first launched during SpaceX’s seventh flight test in January and was retired after the company’s eleventh flight test last month.
While we have yet to get a better sense of Booster 18’s current stage, onlookers described “very significant damage,” particularly to the rocket’s liquid oxygen tanks.
Previous test flights have seen the enormous first stage successfully launch and even be caught upon landing by a pair of “chopsticks” arms attached to a “Mechazilla” launch tower.
Besides its own extremely aggressive timeline, SpaceX also has growing competition to contend with. Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin recently successfully launched its slightly smaller New Glenn heavy-lift rocket for a second time, deploying two cutting-edge NASA spacecraft in the process.
After the trip to space, the rocket’s first stage neatly touched down on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean, firmly proving that SpaceX isn’t the only company capable of such a feat.
Worse yet, the Trump administration has indicated that it’s looking to have Blue Origin compete for the lucrative Artemis 3 human landing systems contract with its Blue Moon lander after all.
Last month, NASA’s interim administrator Sean Duffy told Fox News last month that SpaceX is “behind schedule” — comments that incensed Musk.
More on Starship: SpaceX Releases Renders of the Inside of Its Enormous Lunar Lander
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