FAA grounds SpaceX’s Starship after another launch mishap

Another Starship launch, another Federal Aviation Administration-mandated grounding and mishap investigation that couldn't come at a worse time as SpaceX attempts to court investors for what could be the largest IPO in history. As we reported earlier this week, Friday's launch of the latest iteration of Starship atop its Super Heavy booster started off well enough, but things went sideways during the booster's return sequence. After separating from Starship, the Super Heavy booster attempted its flip maneuver and boostback burn, but engine relight issues prevented a controlled descent, and the craft ended up in the Gulf of Mexico, leading to air traffic delays. Starship reached space, but trouble with one of its Raptor engines forced SpaceX to cancel a planned in-space relight test, further delaying efforts to demonstrate controlled deorbit capability. It took until Wednesday for the FAA to declare the Super Heavy anomaly a formal mishap, and that means Starship is grounded while SpaceX conducts an FAA-directed investigation to determine what went wrong. This was Starship's 12th launch, and marked the sixth time the FAA has grounded it in the past three years. SpaceX hasn't issued a statement on the FAA mishap investigation (we asked, but didn't hear back), instead focusing on the successes of the launch - namely the deployment of 20 Starlink satellite dummies and a couple of modified satellites that took pictures of the craft in space, all of which were burned up in Earth's atmosphere following the launch. To be fair to the Muskian outfit, both Starship itself and the Super Heavy booster were new versions, which means errors are more likely to occur, but a 50/50 FAA grounding rate for launches doesn't exactly bode well for the company's plans to go public in grand fashion. The public filing, released earlier this month, paints a picture of a company that's losing billions at an accelerating rate - SpaceX's full FY 2025 saw the company lose $4.9 billion on $18.7 billion in revenue; in Q1 2026 alone the company lost $4.3 billion on $4.7 billion of revenue, thanks in large part to its recent acquisition of xAI, Elon Musk's artificial intelligence initiative, which requires heavy capital expenditures. Despite these numbers and reports in its risk statement that some of its ideas might just not work (like Starship, so far), SpaceX still claims that it has a total addressable market of $28.5 trillion, which is just a little short of the gross national product of the entire United States. The IPO filing further asserts that founder Elon Musk is one of the great visionaries of our generation," and that SpaceX is the only company that has cracked the code on accessing space at scale" despite reality butting up hard against its ability to scale beyond Falcon 9. If SpaceX keeps causing delays to NASA's Moon mission timeline, the whole thing might explode in investors' faces. (R)