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. Speaking of crews, I've been digging through the analytics of the show and noticed that 37% of you are following the channel
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Thank you so much for your support. 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 listening today. I really do appreciate your support. If you could take a second and hit this subscribe or the follow button on whatever podcast right now, I greatly appreciate it. It helps out the show tremendously and you'll knit and each episode is about 10 minutes
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