The most powerful rocket ever built is now even bigger and more powerful. But will it work?

By Jackie Wattles, CNN

(CNN) — After a seven-month hiatus, SpaceX is set to launch a new, more powerful version of its Starship megarocket — reigniting a make-or-break testing campaign aimed at hashing out unprecedented rocketry challenges and getting the vehicle ready to carry NASA astronauts to the moon.

But experts question whether this vehicle — or a competing spacecraft under development by the Jeff Bezos-founded Blue Origin — will be ready in time to sway the outcome of what US lawmakers say is an ongoing space race with China.

Liftoff, which is slated for Thursday at 6:30 p.m. ET, also comes during a period of mounting scrutiny around SpaceX. The company is headed for a record-shattering initial public offering, and explosive, attention-grabbing mishaps, such as the kind that have resulted from previous Starship test flights, tend to make investors squeamish.

There “are likely more eyes on this test launch than ever before for this company,” noted Andrew Chanin, the CEO of the investment firm ProcureAM. It’s “a risky call to do this highly anticipated launch so close to the IPO.” But, he added, “Fortune favors the bold.”

With SpaceX planning for Starship to play a central role in the future of its space-based internet business, Starlink, as well as offering services to NASA and the US military, there’s a lot riding on the megarocket’s eventual success.

And it’s not yet clear whether Starship will work.

Starship’s explosive record

SpaceX notched some crucial early successes with Starship during uncrewed, suborbital test flights. The company was first able to recover the Super Heavy booster, for example, in October 2024 — landing the rocket snugly in the metal arms of SpaceX’s “Mechazilla” launch tower in Starbase, Texas.

But the company faced several setbacks with Version 2 of Starship, which first took flight in January 2025.

During two separate test flights in January and March, the vehicle exploded near populated areas east of Florida, creating debris that hit roadways in Turks and Caicos and washed up onto Bahamian islands.

On another test flight in May 2025, the launch system performed notably better, but the Starship spacecraft ultimately spun out of control as it descended toward its landing site in the Indian Ocean. Even the Super Heavy booster, which was meant to make a controlled splashdown in the Gulf, exploded upon landing early in the mission.

Following those three incidents — each of which triggered investigations overseen by federal regulators — SpaceX hit another snag when a Starship spacecraft exploded during a ground test last June. The mishap, which occurred as SpaceX was conducting ground tests of the rocket, spurred an emergency response from nearby authorities in Brownsville, Texas.

An incident report, obtained by CNN via a freedom of information act request, described a tense scene.

“Dispatchers were forced into rapid-fire triage, making split-second decisions to prioritize life-threatening emergencies,” the report reads. “At the same time, public panic rippled across the region, and command staff had to rapidly reallocate emergency resources across the city.”

Local officials did not respond to a request for comment about how emergency response preparedness in the area may have changed since the incident.

SpaceX experienced yet another explosive issue during ground testing in November, when the company was aiming to conduct a fueling test of a Starship V3 rocket. The vehicle was destroyed, but “the test site incurred very little damage and of course nobody was hurt in the incident,” according to Joe Petrzelka, SpaceX’s vice president of booster engineering, in a recent Starship promotional video.

Local authorities did not respond to a request for comment about that incident.

Such “anomalies,” as these accidents are called in the space industry, have become a hallmark of SpaceX’s testing campaign for Starship.

But SpaceX has repeatedly said that explosive errors are an integral part of its engineering approach. The company — unlike NASA and others in the aerospace industry — uses a strategy called “rapid iterative development.” The approach emphasizes building prototypes quickly and accepting added risk during test flights.

SpaceX maintains that “rapid iterative development” allows engineers to learn and adjust Starship’s design more cheaply and quickly than if it were to rely on more traditional approaches and extensive ground testing.

“I think every test is always a success,” said Jenna Lowe, senior manager of Starship operations, in a recently published video. “We have this saying called only the paranoid survive. The idea behind it is that there’s an enormous amount of information and data that’s coming to you — and if you can use that wisely, you can usually use that to figure out where things are going to go wrong in the future.”

What to expect with Flight 12

Thursday’s flight test will debut the brand-new Version 3 prototype, outfitted with head-to-toe upgrades designed to make the system more robust.

The new launch vehicle stands slightly taller than the last model, for example, and both the Super Heavy booster and Starship spacecraft, often simply called “ship,” are equipped with a new generation of Raptor rocket engines that pack a considerably heftier punch than their predecessors. Each of Super Heavy’s 33 engines, for example, will deliver more than 50,000 additional pounds of force at liftoff, according to SpaceX. The company says the engines are also lighter, which should give them better efficiency and increased umph.

Importantly, SpaceX aims to eventually reuse the entire rocket — both the bottom Super Heavy rocket booster and the upper Starship spacecraft — which has never been accomplished in the history of spaceflight. Most rockets are discarded entirely after flight, and SpaceX was the first company to figure out how to reuse the first stage, or bottom portion of the rocket, with its far smaller Falcon 9 vehicle.

But the company’s goals for Starship represent myriad complex design and technological challenges.

During Thursday’s hour-long test flight, SpaceX will not attempt to land or recover the booster or ship. The Super Heavy rocket booster will vault the ship toward space before breaking away. Both booster and spacecraft will be on suborbital trajectories but will attempt to make controlled landings in the ocean.

Pivoting to the moon

SpaceX initially advertised Starship as the vehicle that would carry the first humans to Mars, and CEO Elon Musk emphasized that vision as recently as mid-2025. But the company has since made clear that its focus has shifted to first pursue lunar exploration.

Specifically, Starship is the vehicle that NASA has intended to use to return humans to the moon’s surface — and the Trump administration hopes to accomplish that feat by 2028.

If successful, Starship also promises to dramatically reshape the global space industry by lowering the price-per-pound of hauling cargo to orbit by orders of magnitude.

SpaceX advertises Starship as being capable of hauling between 150 and 250 metric tons of cargo to orbit. And a recent financial disclosure from a SpaceX customer put the vehicle’s per-launch sticker price at about $90 million. For context, SpaceX’s Falcon 9, which is currently the most active commercial rocket in the world, launches up to about 22.8 metric tons for a sticker price of $60 to $75 million.

In an IPO filing posted Wednesday evening, SpaceX said it will “aim to reduce the cost to reach orbit by 99% or more relative to the historical average launch cost.”

Mounting timeline pressure

As SpaceX prepares for Thursday’s test flight, the timeline pressure is mounting.

China plans to land its taikonauts on the moon by 2030. And while NASA notched a massive win with its Artemis II mission, which carried a quartet of astronauts on a historic lunar flyby in April, the space agency does not yet have a vehicle capable of landing humans on the moon’s surface.

The Starship program is racing against Blue Origin to provide such a spacecraft for NASA.

In a somewhat direct public admonishment of SpaceX, Sean Duffy, who briefly served as NASA’s acting administrator last year, announced that the space agency would use whichever lander was ready first to complete the planned 2028 landing mission. Previously, Starship had been specifically selected to complete that task.

Blue Origin plans to debut a preliminary design of its lunar lander — which is more similar in design to the Apollo-era vehicles that relayed astronauts from their spacecraft down to the moon’s surface — later this year.

Notably, Starship packs far more power and overall is a more complicated vehicle than the landers that carried Apollo astronauts to the lunar surface. NASA intends to leverage Starship — and the billions of dollars SpaceX has poured into its development — as a nimble in-space transportation system capable of carrying out complex missions to hard-to-reach areas of the moon, such as the resource-rich south pole.

But there’s a long road ahead before that can happen.

Starship still needs to demonstrate it can safely enter a stable orbit around Earth, transfer propellant from one ship to another in order to top off fuel for a lunar journey, and complete an uncrewed test flight to the lunar surface.

The actual lunar lander would be a modified version of the V3 ship, which is packed with life support equipment and all the other trimmings a human-worthy spacecraft needs. All those features also need to be hashed out.

NASA watchdogs have warned about Starship’s complexity and the daunting technical risks associated with using the vehicle for a moon landing “given its intricate operational design, complex concept of operations, and challenges during their ongoing flight test program,” according to a recently published report by NASA’s independent oversight group, the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel.

Another report from NASA’s Inspector General notes that “gaps exist” in the “testing posture and crew survival analyses” of Starship.

“If the landers encounter a catastrophic event, NASA knows it would not have the capability to rescue stranded astronauts from space or the lunar surface,” the report notes.

Still, ProcureAM’s Chanin said that while he can’t make “projections or predictions” about whether Blue Origin or SpaceX will deliver their lunar lander vehicle to NASA first, “it wouldn’t be surprising to see Starship in the lead.”

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.