Updated 9:55 p.m. Eastern with SpaceX statement.
WASHINGTON — SpaceX’s Starship vehicle suffered its second consecutive test flight failure March 6, tumbling in space before breaking up and reentering over the Caribbean.
The Starship/Super Heavy vehicle lifted off on the Flight 8 test flight at 6:30 p.m. Eastern from the company’s Starbase test site in South Texas. The countdown appeared to go smoothly other than a hold at the T-40 second mark that lasted only a few seconds.
The vehicle’s initial phases of flight went as planned. That included the ascent of the vehicle through stage separation and the return of the Super Heavy booster, which was caught back at the launch tower for the third time in four missions dating back to October 2024.
However, just after eight minutes into the flight, four of the six Raptor engines in the Starship upper stage shut down in quick succession. The vehicle immediately began to tumble but continued to relay video, showing the Earth spinning in and out of view.
“Prior to the end of the ascent burn, an energetic event in the aft portion of Starship resulted in the loss of several Raptor engines,” SpaceX said in a statement posted on its website a few hours after the flight. “This in turn led to a loss of attitude control and ultimately a loss of communications with Starship. Final contact with Starship came approximately 9 minutes and 30 seconds after liftoff.”
Several minutes later, observers in parts of the Caribbean, from the Dominican Republic to the Bahamas, and as far north as Florida’s Space Coast, reported seeing the vehicle explode and debris falling. It was uncertain how much debris would reach the ground and where.
The Federal Aviation Administration activated debris response areas, closing off airspace temporarily in parts of the Caribbean, causing some flights to go into holding patterns or divert to other airports. The FAA also established ground stops at several Florida airports, limiting flights heading to them, resulting in delays.
“The FAA is requiring SpaceX to perform a mishap investigation into the loss of the Starship vehicle during launch operations on March 6,” the FAA said in a statement issues shortly after the loss of Starship. Such investigations are typical after incidents like this, including the previous Starship flight in January.
That breakup was similar to the Flight 7 mission Jan. 16, when contact with Starship was lost about eight and a half minutes after liftoff. Debris fell in the Caribbean, with some found in the Turks and Caicos Islands.
The company announced Feb. 24 that it concluded the vehicle suffered a “harmonic response several times stronger in flight than had been seen during testing” that stressed propellant lines. That caused leaks that created fires in the aft “attic” section of the vehicle, causing all but one of the six engines there to perform controlled shutdowns.
SpaceX said it made changes to hardware in the vehicle and operations to prevent similar damage from happening again. It also added vents and a gaseous nitrogen purge system to reduce the flammability of the attic section.
The company scrubbed a launch attempt March 3 after reporting technical issues with the Super Heavy booster and, later, the Starship upper stage. “Too many question marks about this flight,” including low pressure in an engine start system, SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk posted after the scrub. “Best to destack, inspect both stages and try again in a day or two.”
The second failure of Starship in a row is a serious setback for SpaceX’s development of the vehicle. The vehicle is essential to SpaceX’s plans to deploy larger next-generation Starlink satellite. This launch carried four mockups of those satellites that were to have been deployed from Starship during its suborbital flight.
Starship is also critical to NASA’s Artemis lunar exploration campaign. A lunar lander version of Starship will be used to land astronauts on the moon on the first two crewed landings of the program, Artemis 3 and 4, with Artemis 3 planned for as soon as 2027.