How many SpaceX rockets have exploded? Reason behind failure explored as video goes viral

Elon Musk-led SpaceX launched a Starship rocket on Thursday, April 20, 2023, which exploded just minutes after lifting off from a launchpad in South Texas. While the rocket failed to reach orbit, Elon Musk's company stands by its claim that it wasn't a total failure. According to multiple reports, the rocket is the most powerful spacecraft to have ever been launched and has achieved a number of vital milestones.

The rocket succeeded in flying for four minutes and got a distance away from the launchpad before it started to gravitate toward the ground. This ultimately culminated in a high-altitude blast. The small duration of the flight produced a large amount of data for engineers to understand how the vehicle performed.

At 9:33 am ET, the 33 engines on the Super Heavy booster caught on fire in a huge cloud of dust and smoke. Roughly a minute later, the rocket passed through the most crucial moment of maximum aerodynamic pressure.

Viral videos of the rocket showed that several engines on the Super Heavy booster stage failed and the vehicle was sent tumbling in a corkscrew path. During the launch's live stream, John Insprucker, a SpaceX engineer, said that it was not "a nominal situation."

The upper-stage Starship vehicle was not separated from the booster. Four minutes after the launch, the automatic flight termination system destroyed the rocket and thus, the Starship ended in a fireball.

It is also worth noting that the latest launch wasn't the company's first failure. It has previously seen six failed attempts and one partial failure.

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SpaceX Starship was among the 7 failed rocket launch attempts that led to explosions

SpaceX has a history of learning from its mistakes. The company's mantra essentially seems to be, "Fail fast, but learn faster." There have been 6 failed attempts and 1 partial failure by the company. However, it has learned from its mistakes and has a record of them.

Before the Starship launch, the CEO of the private spacecraft company, Elon Musk, had put an end to many expectations. He claimed that it might take several tries before Starship succeeds in the test flight. The succeeding criterion was to reach speeds that were fast enough to enter orbit before splashing down in the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii.

Traditional aerospace companies have spent years trying to anticipate and prevent as many failures as possible. However, this approach can take a lot of time and money and often leads to overdesigned aircrafts. SpaceX is more focused on starting with an imperfect product and is constantly trying to improve it quickly.

In the past, SpaceX has learned from numerous failures. When the company tried to start landing the Falcon 9 boosters, the first few hit too hard and exploded, but the engineers didn't give up and only tweaked the system with each attempt.

After its first successful landing, more success followed. However, the company's Falcon 9 rockets have managed to travel to space as many as 25 times in 2023. The most recent launch of the same happened successfully on Wednesday, April 19, 2023.

A couple of years ago, the company took its trial-and-error approach to fine-tune the landing procedure for Starship. In a long series of tests, prototypes of Starship have lifted to a height of about six miles from the ground before the engines shut down.

They usually belly-flopped through the atmosphere to slow the rate of the fall before tilting vertically and firing their engines for landing. The first few tests ended explosively before one attempt was finally successful.

SpaceX possesses a large financial cushion to avoid setbacks. In their earlier days, they almost went out of business when their first three launches of the original rocket, the small Falcon 1, failed to reach orbit. Elon Musk and SpaceX scraped together just enough money for a fourth launch attempt that was luckily successful.

Almost all of SpaceX's launches have succeeded since then, even though there have been failures at the start of each mission.

During an audio discussion with Twitter users on Sunday, Musk commented on the Starship test flight. He said that if they got more information that helped them improve the design of Starship's upcoming builds, it would be a success. He added:

“It is purely, purely learning.”

After the launch, he offered congratulations to the SpaceX team on Twitter.

Bill Nelson, the NASA administrator, also offered congratulations to the team on Twitter.

The recent explosions have highlighted the cultural divide in the area of space that has been in the scope of government agencies like NASA. Some experts say that the traditional government approach to space missions may be outdated and in need of a more modern perspective like SpaceX seems to be doing.

The Federal Aviation Administration and Elon Musk's aviation company will most likely continue to have tension in the foreseeable future.

The Starship launch on Thursday avoided the worst-case outcome of exploding on the launchpad. This would've caused many lives to be at risk and would have required extensive repairs. Once engineers can determine what went wrong with the launch, they can quickly incorporate the changes in future Starship tests.