Following Another SpaceX Starship Explosion, What Is SpaceX's Failure Rate?

Elon Musk's companies have, for the most part, been pretty successful. Tesla redefined the EV market, and although it's now facing boycotts and stiff competition, the car company was hugely successful for a time. SpaceX, meanwhile, has proven that private space travel is possible, although when one of their rockets explodes, it becomes a pretty major news story.

That's exactly what happened on March 6 when news broke that SpaceX's second starship launch in a role had exploded mid-air. Following the news that the craft had exploded, many wanted to know how many of SpaceX's rockets have blown up. Here's what we know.

Although you might think that basically every SpaceX rocket blows up shortly after launch because the news and social media are saturated with coverage of those explosions, the company actually has a pretty high success rate that's well over 90 percent.

First, it's important to know that there are two kinds of SpaceX launches. Launches in the Falcon 9 family are more routine, and feature technology that is much more well-established than the other category, which is Starship launches.

Falcon 9 launches are designed to launch new Starlink satellites or to deliver supplies to the International Space Station. There have been 458 launches of these rockets, and only three have failed, with one partial failure. It's worth noting that only two of those rockets exploded, with the other two failures involving different technical issues. This is a pretty high degree of success.

Starship launches are, by contrast, much more likely to have problems, and these are the rocket explosions that typically make headlines. Those rockets are designed to be more fully reusable and are still in a more experimental stage. Of the eight launches of those rockets, four have been failures, and all four of those rockets blew up at one point or another, whether upon initial launch or sometime later.

Although it's clear that SpaceX has had some success with some of its rockets, it's fair to say that the road has been rocky for the Starship project. Starship rockets are designed to eventually travel to Mars, and this is the second straight rocket to blow up and leave debris scattered across the sky. The explosion was so bad, in fact, that traffic out of airports in Florida had to be halted as a result.

Elon Musk described the explosion as a "minor setback" and added: "Progress is measured by time. The next ship will be ready in 4 to 6 weeks."

Musk's dream of getting humans to Mars is certainly ambitious, which might explain why it's met with so many failures.

For those who dislike Musk and his views, though, these crashes are just more examples of Musk's general incompetence, and his inability to actually build things that work. Whether SpaceX is the best example of Musk's mismanagement is a question for another time, but what's clear is that he won't be taking his ships to Mars anytime soon.