Multiple Starship test flights have failed in 2024, triggering doubts about timelines for NASA missions

SpaceX has moved a large share of talent onto its biggest project. After a Starship vehicle caught fire during a routine fueling run in June, the company reassigned roughly 20% of engineers from the Falcon 9 team to Starship for six months, according to people familiar with the plan.

The goal is to speed repairs and push faster progress on the rocket Elon Musk says could take crews to the moon and later to Mars.

The approach isn’t new. SpaceX and Musk often surge staff when a problem appears. Last year, Boring Co. workers were flown to Las Vegas to revive the Prufock machine after water damage, people said. According to a report by Bloomberg, in 2018, Tesla Inc. dispatched employees from around the U.S. to California to help ramp up Model 3 production.

Inside SpaceX, the additional hands are aimed at reliability work, testing of parts, and building vehicles more quickly, one person said. In August, the company said a pressurized bottle holding gaseous nitrogen had been damaged, failed, and triggered an explosion during fueling.

The test-stand mishap came after a difficult run for Starship. Of three flights this year from South Texas, two vehicles broke apart early, and a third didn’t release its test satellites and spun out during descent. Those setbacks have fueled doubts about timing.

SpaceX’s track record fuels confidence despite setbacks

Even with the setbacks, SpaceX’s past results shape expectations. The company built the Starlink internet network and advanced reusable rockets, influencing the space sector and U.S. policy while becoming one of the most valuable private firms.

Testing plays out in public, with cinematic livestreams on X, Musk’s platform.

The company emphasizes learning quickly from failure, but rapid changes to machines that cost hundreds of millions can create costly chain reactions.

Musk has set high targets for Starship to be fully reusable, cheaper by orders of magnitude than rivals, and central to reaching Mars.

Early timelines, which included carrying people by 2023 and landing on the moon this year, have not been met. “It’s really one of the hardest engineering challenges that exists,” Musk said at a Tesla owners event in July. “When we first started talking about Starship, people thought this was impossible. In fact, even within the company, we sort of thought it was impossible.”

Starship’s tenth test set amid investor and NASA pressure

SpaceX is targeting a tenth Starship test as early as Aug. 24. More test losses may be financially manageable, but proving momentum will be important for investors and for meeting NASA obligations.

SpaceX started with Falcon, added Dragon for cargo and crew, and now relies on Starlink’s thousands of low-Earth-orbit satellites for most revenue. To speed Starship, it’s shifting engineers from Falcon, which could push some Falcon 9 Starlink missions from late this year to early 2026.

With about 8,000 Starlink satellites already in orbit, a few slipped launches aren’t seen as critical. Getting Starship working is central to SpaceX’s roadmap. It is expected to carry larger, more capable Starlink satellites and, over time, take over from Falcon 9 as the main launcher, executives have said. NASA has awarded roughly $4 billion for Starship to ferry astronauts to the lunar surface.

To meet that, SpaceX must show more than a dozen rapid, in-orbit refueling flights, a sequence never achieved at this scale, and Starship still hasn’t completed a full orbit.

Speed has influenced design choices, according to a person familiar with the process. Recent flights have used a Version 2, or V2, prototype with some decisions made to save time and money. Such bets fit SpaceX’s style, but they can stack risks and shape public views.

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