The incident, later blamed on an “energetic event” in the vehicle’s rear, led to four airports in Florida halting flights for 80 minutes as fragments of Starship streaked through the sky like fireworks.
However, the company did manage to successfully perform only the third “chopstick-style” catch of the first stage booster, effectively making it reusable.
The company’s founder, Elon Musk, called the latest failure a “minor setback” despite it closely mirroring the result of the previous blast-off in January.
“Rockets are hard. Not easy, making life multi-planetary,” Musk said. “But we learnt a good amount in building the new ship design and the flight.”
Starship’s eighth flight test lifted off from Starbase in Texas at 5:30pm CT on Thursday, 6 March.
Roughly three minutes into the flight, the Super Heavy booster separated from its upper stage before returning to its launch pad to be caught for the second time in a row.
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Starship continued onwards on its planned journey to space before an unknown incident led to the loss of several Raptor engines.
Footage from the livestream showed the upper stage spinning before communication was lost nine minutes and 30 seconds after lift-off.
“Unfortunately, this happened last time, too, so we’ve got some practice now,” SpaceX’s Dan Huot said, commenting on the feed.
The explosion led to four airports – Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Palm Beach and Orlando – issuing a ground stop while vehicle fragments could reportedly be seen hurtling through the sky as far away as the Caribbean and Pennsylvania.
“Following the anomaly, SpaceX teams immediately began coordination with the FAA, ATO (air traffic control) and other safety officials to implement pre-planned contingency responses,” the company said in a statement.
“Any surviving debris would have fallen within the pre-planned Debris Response Area.”
Afterwards, SpaceX doubled down on its philosophy that failures during test flights are part of its natural development cycle.
“With a test like this, success comes from what we learn, and today’s flight will help us improve Starship’s reliability,” it said.
“We will conduct a thorough investigation, in coordination with the FAA, and implement corrective actions to make improvements on future Starship flight tests.”
Starship is the collective name for the SpaceX Super Heavy booster rocket and Starship spacecraft, destined to fly humans to Mars one day.
Testing began in April 2023 when the spacecraft failed to reach orbit, but culminated in the first stage incredibly returning to the original launch pad and being caught by mechanical arms in October last year.
Its previous test flight, though, which ended in a similar failure, saw SpaceX radically overhaul the vehicle’s design.
Alterations debuting on flight seven included adding new sensors to the launch site to make the pincer-style catches more accurate and redesigning the propulsion system and heat shield.
Separately, on Saturday, SpaceX revealed that a fuel leak caused a Falcon 9 booster to be destroyed earlier this month.
The booster caught fire after landing on a droneship before toppling over following a Starlink launch.
Adam Thorn
Adam is a journalist who has worked for more than 40 prestigious media brands in the UK and Australia. Since 2005, his varied career has included stints as a reporter, copy editor, feature writer and editor for publications as diverse as Fleet Street newspaper The Sunday Times, fashion bible Jones, media and marketing website Mumbrella as well as lifestyle magazines such as GQ, Woman’s Weekly, Men’s Health and Loaded. He joined Momentum Media in early 2020 and currently writes for Australian Aviation and World of Aviation.
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