— Elon Musk: SpaceX founder and revolutionary private space entrepreneur "Congratulations to all of the people at SpaceX on continuing to make history in the advancement of humanity to the Moon, Mars and beyond!!" Proctor wrote on X. SpaceX engineers now have the task ahead to understand why the Starship vehicle detonated itself using its flight termination system just before completing its launch burn. The company has said it will also study Super Heavy's explosion so future iterations of the vehicle can be returned to Earth for reuse, as it and Starship are designed to do. "Honestly, it's such an incredibly successful day even though we did have a rapid unscheduled disassembly of both the Super Heavy booster and the Ship," SpaceX quality engineering manager Kate Tice said during the live webcast. "That's great. We got so much data, and that will all help us to improve for our next flight." NASA has picked SpaceX's Starship to land astronauts on the moon on the Artemis 3 mission, which the agency hopes to launch by 2025 or 2026. Meanwhile, SpaceX has already sold trips around the moon on Starship to commercial customers, such as Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa, and hopes to use the vehicle for deep space flights to Mars and other solar system destinations. Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: community@space.com. See all comments (0)