After launch, Elon Musk’s Starship fragments in space, forcing flights to change course.

Washington, USA:
Elon Musk’s flagship rocket program was thrown delayed Thursday when a SpaceX Starship prototype failed in space minutes after taking off from Texas, causing airline planes over the Gulf of Mexico to change their route to avoid falling debris.

Eight minutes after taking off from its rocket facility in South Texas at 5:38 p.m. EST (2238 GMT), SpaceX mission control lost communication with the recently modified Starship, which was carrying its first test cargo of dummy satellites.

Reuters captured footage of orange balls of light shooting across the sky over Port-Au-Prince, the capital of Haiti, leaving smoke trails in their wake.

The ship was lost, as confirmed by SpaceX connections Manager Dan Huot minutes later. “We did lose all communications with the ship – that is essentially telling us we had an anomaly with the upper stage,” they stated.

Rarely has a SpaceX accident resulted in significant interruptions to air traffic, but the last time a Starship upper stage failed was in March of last year while it was reentering Earth’s atmosphere over the Indian Ocean.

A Reuters witness said that some flights were grounded at Miami International Airport. According to flight records from tracking service FlightRadar24, at least 20 commercial flights changed their routes or diverted to different airports in order to avoid possible debris. Private launch operations are governed by the Federal Aviation Administration, which stated that it was evaluating the matter.

“Success is uncertain, but entertainment is guaranteed!” remarked Musk, the CEO of SpaceX, after sharing a video of the debris field on X.

Prior to the test, SpaceX described the Starship upper stage as a “new generation ship with significant upgrades,” stating that it was 2 meters (6.56 feet) taller than earlier iterations. About an hour after taking off from Texas, it was scheduled to conduct a controlled splashdown in the Indian Ocean.

In Musk’s multibillion-dollar endeavor to develop a rocket that can transport people and goods to Mars and launch massive satellites into Earth’s orbit, the flight marked SpaceX’s sixth Starship test since 2023.

As SpaceX pushes Starship prototypes to their engineering limits, the company’s test-to-failure development approach has already resulted in spectacular failures. However, the test failure on Thursday happened during a mission phase that SpaceX has already flown through.

As scheduled, the imposing Super Heavy booster returned to its launchpad about seven minutes after liftoff, hooking itself on enormous mechanical arms attached to a launch tower and delaying its descent from space by rekindling its Raptor engines.