SpaceX's Starship rocket roared into space from Texas on Tuesday but spun out of control about halfway through its flight without achieving some of its most important testing goals, bringing fresh engineering hurdles to CEO Elon Musk's increasingly turbulent Mars rocket program.
The 400-foot tall (122 meter) Starship rocket system, the core of Musk's goal of sending humans to Mars, lifted off from SpaceX's Starbase, Texas, launch site, flying beyond the point of two previous explosive attempts earlier this year that sent debris streaking over Caribbean islands and forced dozens of airliners to divert course.
For the latest launch, the ninth full test mission of Starship since the first attempt in April 2023, the upper-stage cruise vessel was lofted to space atop a previously flown booster - a first such demonstration of the booster's reusability.
But SpaceX lost contact with the 232-foot lower-stage booster during its descent before it plunged into the sea, rather than making the controlled splashdown the company had planned, Reuters reported.
Starship, meanwhile, continued into suborbital space but began to spin uncontrollably roughly 30 minutes into the mission. The errant spiraling came after SpaceX canceled a plan to deploy eight mock Starlink satellites into space - the rocket's "Pez" candy dispenser-like mechanism failed to work as designed.
"Not looking great with a lot of our on-orbit objectives for today," SpaceX broadcaster Dan Huot said on a company livestream.
Musk was scheduled to deliver an update on his space exploration ambitions in a speech from Starbase following the test flight, billed as a livestream presentation about "The Road to Making Life Multiplanetary." Hours later, he had yet to give the speech and there was no sign that he intended to do so.
In a post on X, Musk touted Starship's scheduled shutdown of an engine in space, a step previous test flights achieved last year. He said a leak on Starship's primary fuel tank led to its loss of control.
"Lot of good data to review," he said. "Launch cadence for next 3 flights will be faster, at approximately 1 every 3 to 4 weeks."
SpaceX has said the Starship models that have flown this year bear significant design upgrades from previous prototypes, as thousands of company employees work to build a multi-purpose rocket capable of putting massive batches of satellites in space, carrying humans back to the moon and ultimately ferrying astronauts to Mars.
The last two test flights - in January and March - were cut short moments after liftoff as the vehicles blew to pieces on ascent, raining debris over parts of the Caribbean and disrupting scores of commercial airline flights in the region.
The Federal Aviation Administration expanded debris hazard zones around the ascent path for Tuesday's launch.
The previous back-to-back failures occurred in early test-flight phases that SpaceX had easily achieved before, in a striking setback to a program that Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur who founded the rocket company in 2002, had sought to accelerate this year.
Musk, the world's wealthiest individual and a key supporter of US President Donald Trump, was especially eager for a success after vowing in recent days to refocus his attention on his various business ventures, including SpaceX, following a tumultuous foray into national politics and his attempts at cutting government bureaucracy.
Closer to home, Musk also sees Starship as eventually replacing the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket as the workhorse in the company's commercial launch business, which already lofts most of the world's satellites and other payloads to low-Earth orbit.
