After leaving the government, Elon Musk shifted his focus to SpaceX. However, this return did not help Starship take off during the next test. Last Wednesday, Starship exploded on the launch pad. This accident put a lot of pressure on the company and seems to have delayed its ambitious plan to fly to Mars.
Musk announced his goal to send an unmanned Starship to Mars as early as next year. However, as CNN points out, this schedule is extremely tight and based on critically important astronomical windows. Due to the elliptical orbits of Earth and Mars, the distance between them varies from 55 to over 400 million km. For the journey to be effective, the launch needs to happen during a special window when the planets are as close to each other as possible. The next such window will open for just a few weeks at the end of 2026. Missing it would mean a year’s delay and a significantly more expensive mission.
ANOMALY! Just before Ship 36 was set to Static Fire, it blew up at SpaceX Masseys!
Live on X and YT:https://t.co/GPjZIX1Zyd pic.twitter.com/CfZhDeSGae
— NSF – NASASpaceflight.com (@NASASpaceflight) June 19, 2025
A lot of technical challenges
To meet the 2026 deadline, SpaceX has to deal with a bunch of tricky challenges that have kept Starship from getting into space so far. The latest explosion only highlights the reliability issues with the basic design of Starship and its Super Heavy booster. But this is only the beginning. To travel to Mars, Starship will need to refuel in Earth orbit. This means launching a whole fleet of Starship tankers that must dock autonomously and transfer fuel.
“This is an impressive logistical and engineering challenge,” notes Bruce Jakosky, a professor at the University of Colorado. Equally critical is the development of heat shielding capable of withstanding entry into the dense atmospheres of Mars and Earth. Musk called it one of the most difficult engineering challenges.
A decisive step towards flight
Before the fantastic goal of colonizing Mars lies a prosaic but vitally important task: Starship simply has to stop exploding. Each failure forces a re-evaluation of schedules and increases doubts about the feasibility of the next Mars window. Musk’s ambitions are boundless, but the laws of physics and engineering are immutable. The coming months will determine whether SpaceX can make the decisive leap from explosions to spaceflight.
Earlier, we reported on how the constant explosions of Starship did not bother Elon Musk and the Pentagon.
According to CNN
