NASA

Something caused two Raptor engines—one of 33 on the Super Heavy booster and one of six on Starship itself—to fail during Friday’s launch sequence. Raptor failures are nothing new for SpaceX, but this flight marked the first use of the company’s upgraded Raptor 3, a redesign with higher thrust, lighter weight, and improved efficiency. Collectively, the 33 Raptor engines on the booster produced up to 18 million pounds of thrust at full throttle, twice the power of NASA’s Space Launch System rocket used on last month’s Artemis II mission. Starship and Super Heavy have engine-out capability, mean

A future with numerous robotic probes spread throughout the Solar System sounds thrilling to space scientists and space enthusiasts, but you can’t get there with flat budgets and billion-dollar missions that take a decade to get off the ground. Many of NASA’s robotic science missions use purpose-built satellites and instruments, usually manufactured by large contractors like Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, university labs, or NASA itself. Unlike SpaceX’s hangars full of reusable rockets, there’s no building with cameras, spectrometers, telescopes, and spacecraft buses—the core chassis of a