Elon Musk’s New Space Ship Spirals, Breaks Apart Before Debris Crash Into Ocean

The latest SpaceX Starship flight test did not go as they hoped.

On Tuesday, May 27, Starship’s ninth flight test, which is SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s latest step toward his goal of sending humans to Mars by 2026, did not go to plan after liftoff at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. The official launch live stream captured the whole thing.

While the launch showed the vehicle could successfully reach Earth’s orbit, an apparent propellant leak caused a loss of altitude. The spacecraft began spinning, and mission control could no longer control it, per ABC News.

The craft was unable to survive the extreme heat from re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere. The debris fell into the Indian Ocean, per the New York Times.

“As if the flight test was not exciting enough, Starship experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly. Teams will continue to review data and work toward our next flight test,” SpaceX said in a statement on X. “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.”

The latest SpaceX launch comes over two months after Starship’s eighth flight test also concluded early following a rocket explosion, which led planes to be grounded at multiple Florida airports. (The seventh flight, which took place in January, also ended in an explosion.)

On March 6, the company’s eighth test flight, the Starship rocket exploded after liftoff in Texas. The rocket’s engines cut off from the rocket approximately eight minutes into the launch, shortly after the booster was successfully caught back at the tower, per the official live stream.

At the time of the test launch, flights from Miami International Airport, Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport and Philadelphia International Airport were delayed due to “space launch debris,” according to reports from CNN, The Hill and The New York Times.

Smaller airports across the state, including West Palm Beach, Fort Lauderdale, and Orlando, were also affected, CNBC reported at the time.

SpaceX made several alterations to the Starship rocket in the wake of the headline-making explosion, according to the company’s website.

“After completing the investigation into the loss of Starship on its eighth flight test, several hardware changes have been made to increase reliability,” the website stated.

In a full technical report on the launch, published on May 22, the company also revealed that following the investigation, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) gave SpaceX a stamp of approval for its ninth flight test.

“SpaceX led the investigation efforts with oversight from the FAA and participation from NASA, the National Transportation and Safety Board, and the United States Space Force,” the company states. “SpaceX submitted a mishap report to the FAA for review and received a flight safety determination from the FAA to enable its next flight of Starship.”

The company also noted on its website that “developmental testing,” like the May 27 test launch, “by definition is unpredictable.”

“But by putting 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,” the website states.

A notable difference from the previous launch is the May 27 test saw a renewed use of SpaceX’s Super Heavy booster rocket. The booster was not used during the March Starship launch, but was previously used for the seventh test flight in January, according to SpaceX’s website.

Unlike previous missions, however, the company did not attempt to catch the booster.

Rather, “to maximize the safety of launch infrastructure at Starbase, the Super Heavy booster will attempt these experiments while on a trajectory to an offshore landing point in the Gulf of America and will not return to the launch site for catch,” the company stated on its website ahead of the launch.