Another SpaceX Starship flight test ended in an explosion on Thursday, grounding some flights in Florida as debris from the rocket rained down from the sky. It was Starship’s eighth flight test and follows another failed flight in January.
SpaceX, which was founded by billionaire Elon Musk, who is leading the U.S. DOGE Service as it tries to overhaul the federal government, said in a statement on social media that during the uncrewed ship’s ascent burn, it broke apart and lost contact.
“We will review the data from today’s flight test to better understand root cause” SpaceX said, adding that the flight “will offer additional lessons to improve Starship’s reliability.”
Starship is essential to Musk’s vision of eventually colonizing Mars and to NASA’s plans to return astronauts to the moon, The Washington Post has reported. NASA is investing about $4 billion into the system as part of the space agency’s Artemis program.
On its website, SpaceX pitches Starship as a “service to earth orbit, moon, mars and beyond.”
The Federal Aviation Administration said in a statement after the crash that it is requiring SpaceX to perform a mishap investigation, and that it “activated a Debris Response Area and briefly slowed aircraft outside the area where space vehicle debris was falling or stopped aircraft at their departure location.”
As of about 8 p.m. local time, Miami International Airport was still reporting departure delays of 30 minutes with “space launch debris” listed as the cause. Normal operations have since resumed.
Starship took off from the SpaceX base in South Texas at 5:30 p.m. local time. Minutes later, giant mechanical arms caught what is known as the Super Heavy booster, an engineering feat that has been celebrated previously.
According to video footage shared by the company on social media, SpaceX started losing control of the vehicle when the ship gained about 90 miles in altitude, a little more than eight minutes into the flight.
The video showed the ship falling and the loss of several engines before it cut out as the vehicle came hurtling back to Earth. Final communication happened with the ship around 9 minutes and 30 seconds, a statement on SpaceX’s website said.
Eric Loosen, 26, was working on a yacht near Exuma, Bahamas, when he heard someone over the radio asking what was in the sky. “It looked like a bunch of shooting stars just flying very slowly down,” he said. “The main part was lit up quite well and then eventually everything around it started twinkling in the sky.”
“It was a really cool experience seeing that,” he added. “I mean, obviously it’s not cool that it exploded and it landed, I don’t know where, but it did look quite amazing.”
Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer who comments on space launches, wrote on social media after the launch that the road to getting Starship “fully operational and reliable will be far longer and harder than its fans imagine,” but SpaceX’s team will “likely get there in the end.”
