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SpaceX Starship prototype charred but intact after catching fire [photos]
SpaceX teams have finally safed the fourth full-scale Starship prototype nearly two days after a Raptor engine test caught it on fire, an anomaly that left the massive rocket charred and damaged – but still intact.
While SN4’s survival is a welcome and unexpected outcome, the fire that broke out near the base of the rocket caused damage that will have to be repaired, while the fault that allowed that fire to occur in the first place will also need to be rectified. Had the same events transpired during the ship’s inaugural flight test, things could have gone even further south after the rocket lifted off, carrying it away from remotely-controlled water jets used to suppress unplanned fires on the pad.
Thankfully, SpaceX’s focus on testing, testing, and testing some more meant that Starship SN4’s minor self-immolation occurred on the ground when the stakes – while high – were much lower than they would have been with an airborne rocket. The problems uncovered will, of course, need to be fixed, inevitably delaying the ship’s first flight test, but odds are that SN4 now has a better shot at success thanks to those hiccups.
Thanks to the fact that Starships are constructed almost entirely out of steel, a little (or a lot of) fire shouldn’t theoretically be much of a problem. However, SpaceX has taken a rather freeform approach to its early Starship SNx prototypes, opting to bolt, weld, or tape on the vast majority of external hardware with little or no protection from the elements, including fires ignited by the ships themselves.
With SN4, it appears that the pressure jump experiences immediately after Raptor ignition (the ship’s third such test) shook some methane-related plumbing loose. Raptor continued to burn for another five or so seconds after that minor failure, shutting down as planned – but not before it ignited the methane the burst pipe was leaking. Additionally, after that new plume of boiling liquid methane caught fire, the fire it sustained proceeded to ignite insulation wrapped around the rocket’s launch. It burned vigorously, likely helping to damage wiring, ultimately causing SpaceX to partially lose control of the rocket and preventing attempts to inspect and fix the damage for two full days.
It’s safe to say that SpaceX is probably going to prioritize avoiding the series of events that caused May 19th’s anomaly from here on out, considering that things could have easily gone much worse. Thankfully, whatever control SpaceX or the rocket itself retained after wire damage allowed it to safely offload its flammable propellant and vent expanding gases to prevent SN4’s tanks from bursting. Installing highly flammable insulation approximately 10 feet away from an active Raptor engine and giant controlled fire and explosion was also inadvisable and probably won’t be repeated.
Thankfully, the damage is clearly minimal and Starship SN4 survived the ordeal otherwise unscathed. With any luck, inspections and repairs will be quick and easy and SpaceX – as NASASpaceflight reporter Michael Baylor notes – will be able to complete an identical static fire test without starting a fire on Starship SN4. SpaceX has requested a new road closure (signifying planned testing) on May 28th with backup windows on May 29th and June 1st.
Thanks to Starship SN4’s unplanned delays, it now looks quite likely that SpaceX’s next full-scale Starship prototype (SN5) will be completed – or nearly so – by the time that its predecessor is cleared for flight. “Too many Starships” is certainly a welcome problem to have.
Tesla is looking to expand into a new Asian market, strengthening its presence in a region that has been bullish on electric vehicles as a whole.
Tesla officially filed to establish a subsidiary of its business in Vietnam, a report from Reuters suggests. Tesla named the entity “Tesla Motors Vietnam Limited Liability Company.”
The planned entrance into the Vietnamese market is a good sign and move for Tesla, as it has become one of the fastest-growing EV markets in Southeast Asia. It is already among the leaders in the region in both volume and electrification rate. In the first half of this year, Vietnam led Southeast Asia in battery-electric passenger car sales at about 116,000 units, up about 71 percent year over year.
Currently, Vietnamese EV drivers rely on VinFast’s V-Green network, which has about 150,000 ports, but these are primarily reserved for VinFast vehicles. Public third-party charging is fragmented and unreliable for those who do not own chargers that are dedicated to a certain manufacturer’s vehicles.
Tesla has had mixed results in Asia as a whole, and as China remains the core part of its story in Asia, the company is evidently working on expanding its footprint on the continent. Tesla’s domestic retail deliveries fell about 12 percent year over year through the first eight months of 2026.
Model Y remains a standout individual product, holding its position as one of, if not the, best-selling vehicles in the world. However, Model 3 has been weaker than it has been in past years.
Gigafactory Shanghai, the company’s Chinese production facility, still performs very well. Wholesale volumes in terms of exports have more than doubled and now exceed domestic retail sales; Giga Shanghai builds vehicles for Europe, South Korea, Japan, Australia, and other markets. South Korea has been an explicit bright spot, with registrations doubling year-to-date and Tesla frequently appearing as the top imported brand.
Tesla just did something in South Korea that no foreign carmaker has ever done
Tesla’s entrance into Vietnam signals a broader effort to take over the Asian market and grab more market share from rivals.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk’s companies made up with Apple but OpenAI still on the hook
Elon Musk’s X Corp and SpaceXAI dropped their Apple antitrust suit, leaving OpenAI as defendant.
X Corp and SpaceXAI, Elon Musk’s social platform and AI venture, have dropped Apple from the antitrust lawsuit that they filed against the iPhone maker and OpenAI last year. In a filing in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, attorneys for X and SpaceXAI moved to dismiss the Apple portion of the case, first reported by Reuters. The filing does not explain why the companies are dropping Apple or say whether a settlement was reached.
X and SpaceXAI say they intend to keep pursuing the case against OpenAI, which remains a defendant. That resolves the dispute with one company while leaving the core allegation intact against the other, with no public accounting of what changed in between.
The lawsuit dates to August 2025, when xAI and X sued Apple and OpenAI, arguing that Apple’s decision to make ChatGPT the only generative AI chatbot built into iOS gave OpenAI an unfair structural advantage. The complaint claimed ChatGPT controlled roughly 80 percent of the chatbot market at the time, while Grok held only a few percent. It sought billions of dollars in damages and asked the court to unwind the arrangement.
Elon Musk’s xAI and X file antitrust suit against Apple and OpenAI over AI exclusivity
The filing followed weeks of Musk publicly complaining that Grok and X weren’t appearing in Apple’s “Must Have” App Store section, though Grok ranked second in the Productivity category and X ranked first in News at the time. He accused Apple of “playing politics” and warned of immediate legal action before following through days later.
Apple and OpenAI tried to get the case thrown out, but a federal judge denied both motions in November, ruling the dispute was better suited to summary judgment than an early dismissal. That decision sent the case into discovery, which is presumably what led to Monday’s filing.
Hey @Apple App Store, why do you refuse to put either 𝕏 or Grok in your “Must Have” section when 𝕏 is the #1 news app in the world and Grok is #5 among all apps?
Are you playing politics? What gives? Inquiring minds want to know. https://t.co/3wenLZGtwG
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 11, 2025
The timing is notable given how Musk’s sentiment toward Apple has shifted, with Musk noting that he was open to letting Grok power a revamped Siri after a user suggested Apple replace its aging assistant with xAI’s model.
xAI, the AI venture Musk folded into X Corp last year, has since combined with SpaceX under the SpaceXAI brand. That structure now puts X, Grok and SpaceX’s rocket and satellite businesses under one roof as Musk pushes his AI ambitions beyond chatbots.
OpenAI remains the sole defendant going forward, and Musk’s companies have not said if there’s any changes to those original claims. Apple and OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the filing.
News
Why SpaceX is finishing another space-internet system that isn’t Starlink
SpaceX launched three final O3b mPower satellites Sunday, finishing a lesser known SES satellite network.
SpaceX had an 87 minute window opening at 2:49 p.m. Eastern on Sunday to fly a Falcon 9 out of Cape Canaveral carrying the final three satellites for SES’s O3b mPower constellation, a project that has taken more than a decade to finish since Boeing and SES first signed SpaceX on for the work.
Unlike the thousands of Starlink satellites SpaceX has stacked into orbit over the years, O3b mPower flies in a different neighborhood entirely. The three new satellites, tagged F11, F12 and F13, are headed for medium Earth orbit at roughly 5,000 miles up, more than ten times higher than Starlink’s shell around 340 miles but still a small fraction of the 22,000 miles where old school geostationary satellites sit. That middle position is the whole point, because a satellite that far out needs far fewer siblings to blanket the globe than a low orbit constellation does. Essentially, SES only needed 13 satellites total to build a network offering quick, steady service that used to require thousands of spacecraft.
With most people having heard plenty about Starlink and almost nothing about O3b mPower, SES and SpaceX already blend the two networks for some customers. Both SpaceX and SES sell satellite broadband, but they’re aimed at different buyers. Starlink is built for volume, direct to consumers, RVs, homes, small businesses, plus a growing aviation and maritime business. O3b mPower skips consumers entirely and sells enterprise grade connectivity to airlines, cruise lines, offshore energy operators, telecoms needing backhaul, and governments, priced and provisioned more like a dedicated circuit.
A 2023 partnership lets cruise ships combine Starlink’s speed with O3b mPower’s steady capacity depending on what a ship needs at a given moment. Sunday’s completed 13 satellite constellation effectively finishes the medium orbit half of that pairing, years after.
Sunday’s mission was already a something on SpaceX’s manifest well before O3b mPower entered the picture. This flight marked its 29th trip to orbit, a history that includes two crewed Axiom missions, the European Space Agency’s Euclid telescope and 22 separate Starlink batches. SpaceX has landed boosters on the droneship A Shortfall of Gravitas so often that Sunday’s touchdown attempt, if it went as planned, was set to be the 661st successful Falcon booster landing to date.
For a company that pushed the Starlink constellation past 11,000 satellites back in August, almost entirely through bulk launches from California, Sunday’s flight was a reminder that SpaceX’s schedule still has room for someone else’s satellites too. SES gets a finished network built for a narrower set of customers, and Falcon 9 gets one more line on an already long resume.
Tesla looks to expand into new Asian market, strengthening presence
Elon Musk’s companies made up with Apple but OpenAI still on the hook
