The most powerful rocket ever built is now even bigger and more powerful. But will it work?

STARBASE, Texas — After a seven-month hiatus, SpaceX is set to launch a new, more powerful version of its Starship megarocket — reigniting a make-or-break testing campaign aimed at hashing out unprecedented rocketry challenges and getting the vehicle ready to carry NASA astronauts to the moon.

But experts question whether this vehicle — or a competing spacecraft under development by the Jeff Bezos-founded Blue Origin — will be ready in time to sway the outcome of what U.S. lawmakers say is an ongoing space race with China.

Liftoff, which is slated for Thursday at 6:30 p.m. ET, also comes during a period of mounting scrutiny around SpaceX. The company is headed for a record-shattering initial public offering, and explosive, attention-grabbing mishaps, such as the kind that have resulted from previous Starship test flights, tend to make investors squeamish.

There "are likely more eyes on this test launch than ever before for this company," noted Andrew Chanin, the CEO of the investment firm ProcureAM. It's "a risky call to do this highly anticipated launch so close to the IPO." But, he added, "Fortune favors the bold."

With SpaceX planning for Starship to play a central role in the future of its space-based internet business, Starlink, as well as offering services to NASA and the U.S. military, there's a lot riding on the megarocket's eventual success.

And it's not yet clear whether Starship will work.

Starship's explosive record

SpaceX notched some crucial early successes with Starship during uncrewed, suborbital test flights. The company was first able to recover the Super Heavy booster, for example, in October 2024 — landing the rocket snugly in the metal arms of SpaceX's "Mechazilla" launch tower in Starbase, Texas.

But the company faced several setbacks with Version 2 of Starship, which first took flight in January 2025.

During two separate test flights in January and March, the vehicle exploded near populated areas east of Florida, creating debris that hit roadways in Turks and Caicos and washed up onto Bahamian islands.

On another test flight in May 2025, the launch system performed notably better, but the Starship spacecraft ultimately spun out of control as it descended toward its landing site in the Indian Ocean. Even the Super Heavy booster, which was meant to make a controlled splashdown in the Gulf, exploded upon landing early in the mission.

Following those three incidents — each of which triggered investigations overseen by federal regulators — SpaceX hit another snag when a Starship spacecraft exploded during a ground test last June. The mishap, which occurred as SpaceX was conducting ground tests of the rocket, spurred an emergency response from nearby authorities in Brownsville, Texas.

An incident report, obtained by CNN via a freedom of information act request, described a tense scene.

"Dispatchers were forced into rapid-fire triage, making split-second decisions to prioritize life-threatening emergencies," the report reads. "At the same time, public panic rippled across the region, and command staff had to rapidly reallocate emergency resources across the city."

Local officials did not respond to a request for comment about how emergency response preparedness in the area may have changed since the incident.

SpaceX experienced yet another explosive issue during ground testing in November, when the company was aiming to conduct a fueling test of a Starship V3 rocket. The vehicle was destroyed, but "the test site incurred very little damage and, of course, nobody was hurt in the incident," according to Joe Petrzelka, SpaceX's vice president of booster engineering, in a recent Starship promotional video.

Local authorities did not respond to a request for comment about that incident.

Such "anomalies," as these accidents are called in the space industry, have become a hallmark of SpaceX's testing campaign for Starship.

But SpaceX has repeatedly said that explosive errors are an integral part of its engineering approach. The company — unlike NASA and others in the aerospace industry — uses a strategy called "rapid iterative development." The approach emphasizes building prototypes quickly and accepting added risk during test flights.

SpaceX maintains that "rapid iterative development" allows engineers to learn and adjust Starship's design more cheaply and quickly than if it were to rely on more traditional approaches and extensive ground testing.

"I think every test is always a success," said Jenna Lowe, senior manager of Starship operations, in a recently published video. "We have this saying called only the paranoid survive. The idea behind it is that there's an enormous amount of information and data that's coming to you — and if you can use that wisely, you can usually use that to figure out where things are going to go wrong in the future."

What to expect with Flight 12

Thursday's flight test will debut the brand-new Version 3 prototype, outfitted with head-to-toe upgrades designed to make the system more robust.

The new launch vehicle stands slightly taller than the last model, for example, and both the Super Heavy booster and Starship spacecraft, often simply called "ship," are equipped with a new generation of Raptor rocket engines that pack a considerably heftier punch than their predecessors. Each of Super Heavy's 33 engines, for example, will deliver more than 50,000 additional pounds of force at liftoff, according to SpaceX. The company says the engines are also lighter, which should give them better efficiency and increased umph.

Importantly, SpaceX aims to eventually reuse the entire rocket — both the bottom Super Heavy rocket booster and the upper Starship spacecraft — which has never been accomplished in the history of spaceflight. Most rockets are discarded entirely after flight, and SpaceX was the first company to figure out how to reuse the first stage, or bottom portion of the rocket, with its far smaller Falcon 9 vehicle.

But the company's goals for Starship represent myriad complex design and technological challenges.

During Thursday's hour-long test flight, SpaceX will not attempt to land or recover the booster or ship. The Super Heavy rocket booster will vault the ship toward space before breaking away. Both booster and spacecraft will be on suborbital trajectories but will attempt to make controlled landings in the ocean.

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