SpaceX’s Starship fails 9th test flight after ‘rapid unscheduled disassembly’

SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket company, saw its ninth flight test fail when the spacecraft “experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly approximately six minutes after launch.”

The Starship blasted off from SpaceX’s launch site, Starbase, Texas, where residents voted this month to organize as an official city.

“As if the flight test was not exciting enough, Starship experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly,” the company wrote on X. “Teams will continue to review data and work toward our next flight test. With a test like this, success comes from what we learn, and today’s test will help us improve Starship’s reliability as SpaceX seeks to make life multiplanetary.”

Musk said the launch was a “big improvement” from the last two, which resulted in explosions over the Atlantic Ocean.

It was the first time one of Musk’s Starships — intended for moon and Mars travel — flew with a recycled booster. There were no plans to catch the booster at the launch pad, with the company instead pushing it to its limits. Contact with the booster was lost at one point and it slammed into the Gulf of Mexico in pieces as the spacecraft continued toward the Indian Ocean.

“Not looking great with a lot of our on-orbit objectives for today,” said SpaceX flight commentator Dan Huot, according to the Associated Press. The company was looking to test the spacecraft’s heat shield during a controlled reentry. Communication ceased before the spacecraft came down, and SpaceX ended its webcast soon afterward.

NASA needs SpaceX to show progress over the next year with Starship — the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built — so it can land astronauts back on the moon. Next year’s moonshot attempt with four astronauts will fly around the moon, but will not land. That is expected to happen in 2027 at the earliest and require a Starship to get two astronauts from lunar orbit to the surface and back off again.

Editor’s note: The Associated Press contributed to this article.

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