SpaceX’s Starship launcher spun out of control minutes after liftoff Thursday, showering fiery debris over the Bahamas and dealing another setback to Elon Musk’s rocket program after a failure under similar circumstances less than two months ago.
Starship and its Super Heavy booster, loaded with millions of pounds of methane and liquid oxygen propellants, lumbered off their launchpad in Texas at 5:30 pm Central time to begin the eighth full-scale test flight of SpaceX’s new-generation rocket. Thirty-three Raptor engines propelled the 404-foot-tall (123.1-meter) rocket through a clear afternoon sky with more than twice the power of NASA’s Saturn V rocket, the workhorse of the Apollo lunar program.
Repeating a feat SpaceX accomplished with Starship twice before, the rocket’s Super Heavy booster separated from the Starship upper stage roughly two-and-a-half minutes into the flight, then guided itself back to the Texas coastline for a catch by mechanical arms on the launchpad’s tower. SpaceX is now 3-for-3 with attempts to catch a Super Heavy booster back at the launch site, a sign that engineers are well on their way to mastering how to recover and reuse boosters in a similar way as they do with the smaller workhorse Falcon 9 rocket.
But SpaceX is now 0-for-2 on test flights of the newest version of Starship, called Block 2 or Version 2. The first six Starship test flights used an initial version of the ship, but SpaceX is modernizing its fleet with Starship Block 2, which stands slightly taller than the first version in order to accommodate additional propellants. Starship Block 2 also debuts smaller forward flaps to give the hardware another layer of protection from the scorching heat of reentry. The other notable change with Block 2 is a redesigned fuel-line system to feed propellants to the ship’s six Raptor engines.
Hardware Rich
The good news is there are many more Starships under construction in South Texas, so SpaceX likely won’t have to wait long to try again. The company started the year aiming for as many as 25 Starship test flights in 2025 but will end the first quarter of the year with just two.
“Today was a minor setback,” wrote Elon Musk, SpaceX’s CEO, on X. “Progress is measured by time. The next ship will be ready in 4 to 6 weeks.”
SpaceX Starship Flight 8 launches from Orbital Launch Pad A at Boca Chica beach on March 06, 2025 in Boca Chica Beach, Texas.
Photograph: Brandon Bell/Getty Images
SpaceX has contracts with NASA worth approximately $4 billion to design and develop a human-rated Moon lander based on the Starship design. The Starship lander is a central piece of NASA’s architecture for the Artemis program, which aims to return astronauts to the lunar surface later this decade. For Starship to fly to the Moon, SpaceX must refill it with super-cold propellants in low-Earth orbit, something no one has done at this scale before.
Musk sees Starship as the interplanetary backbone for transporting cargo and people to Mars, one of his most consistent long-term goals. This, too, requires orbital refueling. Musk recently suggested SpaceX could be ready to demonstrate ship-to-ship orbital refueling in 2026, a year later than the 2025 goal NASA officials discussed in December.
Starship will also launch SpaceX’s next-generation Starlink Internet satellites. Before Thursday’s launch, ground crews loaded four Starlink mock-ups inside Starship’s payload bay to test the rocket’s deployment mechanism. Officials were eager to assess the performance of Starship Block 2’s heat shield before committing to an attempt to recover the ship intact (like SpaceX is already doing with the Super Heavy booster) on a future mission. But the premature ending of this test flight means those objectives must wait.
SpaceX oversees Starship using an iterative development cycle. Engineers come up with new designs, rapidly test them, and then incorporate lessons learned into the next rocket. It’s not surprising to see a few rockets blow up using this spiral development cycle. But back-to-back failures, especially with so many similarities, may point to a more fundamental issue.
The flight plan going into Thursday’s mission called for sending Starship on a journey halfway around the world from Texas, culminating in a controlled reentry over the Indian Ocean before splashing down northwest of Australia.
The test flight was supposed to be a do-over of the previous Starship flight on January 16, when the rocket’s upper stage—itself known as Starship, or ship—succumbed to fires fueled by leaking propellants in its engine bay. Engineers determined the most likely cause of the propellant leak was a harmonic response several times stronger than predicted, suggesting the vibrations during the ship’s climb into space were in resonance with the vehicle’s natural frequency. This would have intensified the vibrations beyond the levels engineers expected.
The Super Heavy booster returned to Starbase in Texas to be caught back at the launch pad.
Photograph: Scott Schilke/AP Photo
Engineers test-fired the Starship vehicle earlier this month for this week’s test flight, validating changes to propellant temperatures, operating thrust, and the ship’s fuel feed lines leading to its six Raptor engines.
But engineers missed something. On Thursday, the Raptor engines began shutting down on Starship about eight minutes into the flight, and the rocket started tumbling 90 miles (146 kilometers) over the southeastern Gulf of Mexico. SpaceX ground controllers lost all contact with the rocket about nine-and-a-half minutes after liftoff.
“Prior to the end of the ascent burn, an energetic event in the aft portion of Starship resulted in the loss of several Raptor engines,” SpaceX wrote on X. “This in turn led to a loss of attitude control and ultimately a loss of communications with Starship.”
Just like in January, residents and tourists across the Florida peninsula, the Bahamas, and the Turks and Caicos islands shared videos of fiery debris trails appearing in the twilight sky. Air traffic controllers diverted or delayed dozens of commercial airline flights flying through the debris footprint, just as they did in response to the January incident.
There were no immediate reports Thursday of any Starship wreckage falling over populated areas. In January, residents in Turks and Caicos recovered small debris fragments, including one piece that caused minor damage when it struck a car. The debris field from Thursday’s failed flight appeared to fall west of the areas where debris fell after Starship Flight 7.
A spokesperson for the US Federal Aviation Administration said the regulatory agency will require SpaceX to perform an investigation into Thursday’s Starship failure.
This story originally appeared on Ars Technica.
