SpaceX Starship Breaks Up Mid-Flight During Latest Test

Key Highlights

• SpaceX’s ninth Starship test ended with spacecraft disintegration after a fuel leak caused loss of control.
• The rocket aimed to deploy fake satellites and test heat shields but failed mid-mission.
• Despite setbacks, SpaceX continues testing for NASA’s 2027 moon mission goals.

After two straight explosions, SpaceX took off another Starship rocket on Tuesday, though this time it fell short when the spacecraft lost its balance and broke up.

The company launched the 123-metre rocket from Starbase, Texas for its ninth test. This month, residents voted to become an official city. SpaceX was planning to release a set of fake satellites after liftoff, but the door not opening correctly put an end to that plan.

Then the spacecraft began turning in the air before it came to a spontaneous stop in the Indian Ocean. Later on, SpaceX confirmed that the spacecraft was quickly damaged and came apart without warning. The company said in a statement online that teams are reviewing the data and moving forward to the next stage of flight testing.

The company tested a recycled booster with one of its Starships for the first time. In contrast to past tests, the booster did not have giant chopsticks waiting at the launch pad to catch it.

“We lost contact with the booster for a period and then pieces of it crashed into the Gulf of Mexico, as the spacecraft traveled further to the Indian Ocean. Next, the spacecraft had you lose control of it apparently because of fuel leaks. We’re not having much luck with our in-orbit objectives today,” according to Dan Huot at SpaceX.

The company was hoping to lower the spacecraft into Earth’s atmosphere to see how the heat shield would fare. Contact with the spacecraft broke down before it landed and SpaceX closed their webcast afterward. Before this one, all Starships managed to go no further than the Caribbean waters.

Starship was cleared for a second flight last week by the Federal Aviation Administration, who made the area for launching bigger and shifted the flight to outside normal peak air traffic. Apart from making modifications and adding new hardware, SpaceX repaired the thermal tiles of the spacecraft and put in special hooks to make catching it easier.

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The Indian Ocean is where this rocket was set to land, but the company planned to test the add-ons for collecting its next spacecraft by returning to the launch pad. For NASA to put astronauts back on the moon, SpaceX must quickly advance Starship -- the biggest and strongest rocket yet -- in the next year. Next year’s planned moonshot with four astronauts is designed to fly around the moon only; they will not land. The earliest time for this will be 2027 and can only occur with a Starship bringing two astronauts down from lunar orbit and back up again.