SpaceX flew Starship 5 times in 2025.
Only two of those flights ended with the ship in one piece.
The first 3 attempts of the year all failed.
During ascent, ship 33 developed a harmonic response in its F
section and burned up over the Turks and Caicos.
Ship 34 caught fire in the engine compartment due to
incorrectly preloaded engine mount bolts.
Ship 35 lost control after a methane pressurization leak and
tow into re entry. Then in June, Ship 36 exploded
on the test stand before it even flew.
By the middle of the year, SpaceX has lost four ships in a
row and destroyed the infrastructure needed to test
them. This is the most important
rocket program in America and has spent six months breaking
things. What happened next is the reason
SpaceX remains the most capable launch company on Earth.
Flight 10 launched on August 26th. 125 Ship 37 completed
every objective and deployed Starling simulators in orbit,
relayed A Raptor engine in space, survived reentry, and
landed intact in the Indian Ocean.
Flight 11 repeated the success in October, and both vehicles
splashed down exactly where they were supposed to.
SpaceX closed the year having recovered from disaster and
proven the block to Starship actually works.
Now they are tearing everything to building something bigger.
The story of Starship in 2025 is not just about flight tests,
it's about infrastructure. SpaceX is constructing what may
be the largest rocket production and launch complex ever built,
and they're doing it simultaneously in Texas and in
Florida as Starbase Texas. Crews demolished the original
high Bay in the Stargate Building to make room for a new
structure called Giga Bay. The current mega Bay at Star
Base can house a maximum of 6 workstations.
Giga Bay will house at least 24 as of the end of December.
The structure is at least three levels of steel columns, with at
least two more to go before the roof.
A nearly identical Giga Bay is rising and Roberts roads and
floors and the two sites are racing to see which finishes
first. These facilities are not
optional upgrades, they're necessary for the next
generation of the vehicle. Block 4 Starship will use an 80m
tall booster compared to the 71 meter boosters flying today.
The current mega bays are not tall enough to build them.
Until the gigabase are complete, SpaceX cannot manufacture the
next block of hardware. The structure and the schedule
for everything that follows, including crude lunar landings,
depends on those buildings going up now.
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Now the launch site build out is equally aggressive.
Pad 2 with Starbase is nearly complete.
The tower was fully stacked and around 2024 the launch mount was
installed. In May of 2025.
The side service structure, which houses all the cryo veils,
high pressure lines and electrical systems, looks like
it's finished. This is a new design that will
become the standard for all future Starship pads.
Pad 1 supported all 11 full stack flights and even served as
an emergency ship. Static fire stand after the
Massey's explosion was demolished after flight.
It's gone, but it will be rebuilt and reborn to match the
new specifications. Like a Phoenix, it'll rise again
in Florida. LC39A has made substantial
progress after sitting dormant for years following the tower
installation in 2022. After the past year, SpaceX
built a large section of the tank farm, excavated and
constructed the flame trench, and modified the chopsticks.
There's still work to do, but SpaceX is targeting the
second-half of 2026 for the first launch attempt from
Kennedy Space Center. This would be the first Starship
launch from Florida in the first used of a second operational
pad. On December 1st of 2025, X
received environmental approval to begin construction on SLC 37,
where two additional launch launch towers will be built.
SLC 37 is historic. It was originally built for the
Saturn in Saturn 1V rockets that preceded Apollo.
It has been inactive for decades, and SpaceX will
transform it into a dual pad Starship complex.
When all this is finished, SpaceX will have 5 operational
Starship pads, 2 at star base, one at LC39A, and two at SLC 37.
No other rocket program in history has attempted to build
launch infrastructure at this scale and at this speed.
And for comparison, NASA spent years building a single mobile
launcher for the SLS. Now, getting vehicles from Texas
to Florida will require a new logistics Jade.
SpaceX is preparing to transport completed and tested Starships
horizontally on a barge called Marmac 31.
This barge was recently spotted delivering a liquid oxygen tank
to the turning basin near LC39A. What's the gig of a Roberts Rd.
is operational and Star Factory's built.
Florida will be able to produce its own vehicles, but until
then, everything ships from Star Base now.
Block 3 is supposed to open 2026 with a back.
Butt has already hit a set back a bang.
Booster 18, which was slated to fly on Flight 12 alongside Ship
39, suffered a failure during pneumatic pressure testing at
Massey's. A composite overwrapped pressure
vessel, or COPD, appears to have failed, causing the liquid
oxygen tank to rupture, and the booster was destroyed.
SpaceX responded by speed stacking Booster 19 in 26 days,
the faster, fastest booster integration in program history.
The Ship 39 is waiting in Mega Bay 2 for the cryogenic proof
station and Massey's to be ready now.
Block 3 should be a near clean sheet, redesigned from the
booster and significant upgrades for the IT is the vehicle that
will eventually carry crew. The flight test results from
2025 tell a story of resilience under pressure. 3 consecutive
ship failures in the first half of the year could have derailed
the program. The explosion of ship 36
destroyed critical ground infrastructure and for SpaceX to
improvise a new testing approach and launch bound itself.
The fact that flights 10 and 11 both succeeded suggests the
engineering problems have been solved, at least for Block 2.
Whether Block 3 performs forms as well remains to be seen, and
the program has never gone more than two flights without any
major anomaly. There were also historic
achievements. Flight 7 and 8 both resulted in
successful booster catches, bringing the total to three.
Booster 14 came back to the tower on January 16th, 2025,
becoming the second Super Heavy ever caught.
Booster 15 followed on March 6th, becoming the third.
As of the end of 2025, no booster has been caught since.
Flights 10 and 11 both ended with booster splashdowns in the
Gulf of Mexico rather than catch attempts.
SpaceX has not publicly explained why they stopped
trying to catch boosters, but the pad demolition and rebuild
likely play a role in this. You can't catch a booster if the
tower is being torn down in the meantime.
Now, Flight 9 marked the first reflight of a Super Heavy
booster. Booster 14 Two completed a
perfect splashdown using 29 reused Raptor engines.
This was a critical milestone for reusability, even though the
ship on that flight was completely lost the ability to
fly the same booster twice as foundational to the economics of
the entire program. The boosters cannot be reused.
Starship becomes an expendable vehicle that happens to be
extra, extra large, and Flight 9 proved that reuse is possible.
The next step is proving it works consistently, and.
Flight 11 was the final launch of Block 2 and the final launch
from pad 1 and its original configuration.
Ship 38 in booster 15-2 lifted off on October 13, 2025, and
both vehicles completed all objectives.
The booster splashed out in the Gulf, the ship deployed star
simulators relit its Raptor engine in space, survived
reentry, and landed in the Indian Ocean.
It was a fitting end to a chapter that, again with Flight
1 in April 2023, the vehicle exploded 4 minutes after
liftoff, and SpaceX celebrated because it cleared the tower.
The ambition is staggering. SpaceX is not just iterating on
a rocket. They're building and building
and building, and they're building an industrial base
capable of producing and launching Starships at a rate
that would make the vehicle effectively disposable if
needed, or rapidly reusable if the catch system works
consistently. The giga bays are sized to
support that vision. The five launch pads are sized
to support that vision. The barge transport system is
designed to keep Florida supplied with vehicles even
before production comes online. Every piece connects in this
vision. Now, whether SpaceX can execute
remains the open question. The Massey's stand is still not
fully operational after the Ship 36 explosion.
That getting to it. Wooster 18 was lost before it
even flew. Ship 39 is waiting on
infrastructure repairs. Block 3 has not completed a
single flight. LC39A has never launched A
Starship. SLC 37 is a construction site.
The company is building faster than anyone else.
But building is not the same as flying and Flight 12 will be the
first real test of whether 2026 can deliver on the promise of
2025. Now the foundations for this are
all laid has to prove they can stand on those foundations.
This is the rocket that will carry humans back to the surface
of the moon and it's still learning how to fly.
SpaceX will succeed and they will eventually get people to
the surface of Mars. Hey, thank you so much for
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