SpaceX’s Starship has dramatically exploded mid-flight, leaving smears of confetti-like wreckage across the sky as its remains tumbled back to Earth. The fireball triggered diversions and delays to air traffic in Florida and the Caribbean amid warnings of falling debris.
The uncrewed rocket, the largest ever built, blasted off from SpaceX’s Starbase at Boca Chica, Texas at 6:30 p.m. EST on March 6.
But the vessel spun out of control about nine minutes after launch, resulting in “a rapid unscheduled disassembly”, SpaceX representatives said in a post on the social platform X.
Starship struggles
This is the eighth Starship launch since April 2023 and the second consecutive failure this year for SpaceX’s rocket. Less than two months ago, the seventh Starship flight ended in an explosion that hurled fiery debris across skies above the Turks and Caicos Islands.
Just like after the previous failed launch, the Federal Aviation Administration has grounded further flights of the rocket pending a mishap investigation, which will be conducted by SpaceX.
“We will review the data from today’s flight test to better understand [the] root cause,” company representatives wrote on X. “As always, success comes from what we learn, and today’s flight will offer additional lessons to improve Starship’s reliability.”
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Standing 403 feet (123 meters) tall and propelled by a record-breaking 16.5 million pounds (7.5 million kilograms) of thrust from its 33-engine Super Heavy booster rocket, Starship can carry 10 times the payload of SpaceX’s current Falcon 9 rockets.
The gargantuan rocket is key to SpaceX majority shareholder Elon Musk’s ambitions to transport crewmembers, spacecraft, satellites and cargo into orbit around Earth and to the moon and Mars.
Starship is designed primarily with cheap and efficient manufacturing in mind, using inexpensive stainless steel for its construction and methane — which SpaceX says can be collected on Mars — to power the rocket.
The mission was a test flight, with the aim of testing the rocket’s capabilities by deploying four mock Starlink satellites and restarting its engines in space before plopping down in the Indian Ocean. The exact cause of the explosion is currently unclear, although SpaceX representatives attributed it to “an energetic event in the aft portion of Starship” that caused the loss of several Raptor engines.
The explosion caused delays at Fort Lauderdale, Miami International and Philadelphia International airports between an average of 30 to 45 minutes, while planes flying over the Caribbean altered their flight paths to avoid the wreckage, imagery from Flightradar24 shows.
Flying wreckage from the previous failed launch, which is still being recovered, reportedly caused minor damage to a car in the Turks and Caicos Islands.
SpaceX said at the time that there were no toxic materials among the debris, although anyone who finds a piece of debris is advised not to handle it directly and to instead contact local authorities or the SpaceX Debris Hotline.
Following the previous explosion, SpaceX announced it had made upgrades to the Starship spacecraft that flew yesterday, including the installation of additional vents and a purge system that used nitrogen to flush fuel leaks and make the aft less flammable. It’s clear that these didn’t get rid of the problem, but company representatives are optimistic that they can find and fix the faults.
“Unfortunately this happened last time too, so we’ve got some practice now,” Dan Huot, a communications manager at SpaceX, said on a live stream of the launch.
