Another SpaceX Starship lost during test flight despite successful booster catch

Another SpaceX Starship lost during test flight despite successful booster catch

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SpaceX lost contact again in its latest test flight of the Starship and Super Heavy rocket from Texas, leading to the dramatic in-flight destruction of the Starship and grounding planes at several Florida airports, including Orlando International Airport.

The rocket was making its eighth suborbital launch attempt, and SpaceX was able to perform the third-ever catch of the booster back at the tower. The test flight came just under two months since the last attempt ended explosively over the Atlantic.

Video of the disintegrating Starship was once again captured across the Bahamas, Turks & Caicos, the Caribbean and spotted from Florida as well.

The Federal Aviation Administration put a ground stop at airports in Miami, Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach through 8 p.m. OIA officials announced at 7:43 p.m. in a post on X that its ground stop had been lifted.

The rocket lifted off just after 6:30 p.m. EST from SpaceX’s Starbase launch site in Boca Chica, Texas. The flight profile once again called for the Super Heavy booster to fly back to the launch tower caught on the tower’s pivoting arms called chopsticks.

The upper stage Starship then was supposed to continue halfway around the planet to attempt a water landing in the Indian Ocean off the west coast of Australia.

But teams lost contact again over the Atlantic.

“Unfortunately it seems as we lost the attitude control of the ship,” said SpaceX commentator Kate Tice.

Fellow commentator Dan Huot said telemetry showed engines going out with only about 20 seconds left in the upper stage’s ascent burn.

“We did see the ship start to go into a spin and at this point we have lost contact with the ship,” he said.

The failure follows a similar pattern seen during the Jan. 16 launch, which also saw a successful catch of the Super Heavy booster, but the Starship spacecraft blew up after passing over the Gulf of Mexico with scenes of the streaking debris posted to social media from places like the Turks & Caicos.

The event grounded the in-development rocket, but the Federal Aviation Administration cleared it to launch again as of Feb. 26.

“After completing the required and comprehensive safety review, the FAA determined the SpaceX Starship vehicle can return to flight operations while the investigation into the Jan. 16 Starship Flight 7 mishap remains open,” the FAA stated. “The FAA is overseeing the SpaceX-led investigation.”

The flight was an effort to continue progress for Elon Musk’s heavy-lift rocket program.

“Several hardware and operational changes have been made to increase reliability of the upper stage,” SpaceX posted on its website.

To support an increased pace of launches in the coming years, SpaceX continues to move forward with a second launch site in Texas and announced $1.8 billion in infrastructure to assist in launch sites from Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. It hopes to launch from the KSC site at Launch Complex 39-A before the end of the year.

For this test launch, though, the objectives that were not reached during the last attempt were on tap again. That included a test run of payload deployment and reentry experiments that the company hoped would lead to a future launch with the upper stage landing back at the Texas launch site.

The four test payloads were to have simulated the size of SpaceX’s Starlink satellites and follow the same trajectory of the upper Starship stage so they could burn up on reentry.

“Developmental testing by definition is unpredictable,” SpaceX posted. “But by putting flight hardware in a flight environment as frequently as possible, we’re able to quickly learn and execute design changes as we seek to bring Starship online as a fully and rapidly reusable vehicle.”

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