SpaceX’s Starship spiraled out of control while in space during a test flight on Thursday, marking the second launch in a row that the vehicle has run into a fatal problem on its way to orbit.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) briefly halted flights into major Florida airports and appears to have diverted some others out of caution of “space launch debris.”
The company launched Starship using its Super Heavy booster and things looked normal for the first eight minutes of the flight prior to the problem. The ship successfully separated and headed into space, while the booster came back to the company’s launchpad in Texas, where it was caught for a third time by the launch tower.
But at around eight minutes and nine seconds into the flight, SpaceX’s broadcast graphics showed Starship lose multiple Raptor engines on the vehicle. On-board footage showed the ship started spiraling end over end over the ocean.
“We just saw some engines go out, it looks like we are losing attitude control of the ship,” SpaceX communications manager Dan Huot said on the broadcast. “At this point we have lost contact with the ship.”
Footage posted to social media showed the ship breaking up over the Bahamas and the Dominican Republic a few minutes later. The company posted to X that it “immediately began coordination with safety officials to implement pre-planned contingency responses.”
The high-profile back-to-back explosions come as SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has spent the last few weeks causing chaos across United States federal government with his so-called Department of Government Efficiency. That has included him deploying employees to the FAA, which oversees SpaceX’s flights.
The FAA did not immediately respond to a request for comment. An email sent to the press office received an automated reply saying that the FAA’s “press box is staffed from 7:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday (ET).”
SpaceX was hoping to deploy four dummy versions of its Starlink satellites during Thursday’s test flight, a step towards the goal of using Starship for commercial missions. The company has been purposely developing Starship by doing test flights in rapid succession, and learning from the things that go both right and wrong.
But Thursday’s failure comes just a few weeks after the seventh test flight, which saw Starship break up in spectacular fashion over the islands of Turks & Caicos, which caused the FAA to divert a number of flights in that airspace.
SpaceX performed what’s known as a “mishap investigation” into that failure. The company determined propellant was leaking inside Starship, which caused fires and a communications blackout with the ship before it self-destructed.
Ahead of this test flight, SpaceX said it made improvements to the lines that send fuel to Starship’s engines and changed the temperature of the propellant. It also added extra vents and “a new purge system” to better hedge against any leaks.
On some of its previous test flights, SpaceX saw its Starship break up as it attempted to re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere. The company rolled out changes on the seventh test flight that were supposed to help it learn how to better prepare the ship to survive that re-entry.
“With Flight 8, we’re focused on finding the real-world limits of Starship so we can prepare to eventually return Starship to the launch site and catch it,” the company wrote on X on Thursday.
