Musk, in a tweet shortly after the Starship SN3 incident, suggested the failure may have been caused by a problem with the test itself. Those tests took place in early March without incident. SpaceX decided to strip the next Starship vehicle, SN2, down to that tank to test the performance of the thrust puck weld. Elon Musk, founder and chief executive of SpaceX, said that the failure in that test appeared to be with a “thrust puck” at the base of the tank that takes the load from the vehicle’s Raptor engines. 28, this time with the vehicle bursting near its base. The company said at the time that the incident took place in a test intended to “pressurize systems to the max, so the outcome was not completely unexpected.”Ī second Starship vehicle, SN1, was also destroyed in a cryogenic tanking test Feb. In November 2019, the Starship Mark 1 vehicle suffered a bulkhead failure during a similar test, sending debris flying.

The accident marks the third time a prototype of Starship failed that cryogenic tanking test.

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