SPACE X’s Starship rocket has exploded during a test flight again – sending blazing debris across the sky and grounding several flights in Florida.
The 403-foot rocket lifted off from Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas, at around 6.30pm local time but went into an uncontrolled spin just minutes later.
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Thursday’s explosion marked yet another flopped launch in just months for Elon Musk’s space company.
Engines on top of Starship began shutting down as it streaked eastward, and contact was lost.
The flight was meant to end with a controlled descent over the Indian Ocean.
Incredible footage circulating on social media shows the dramatic breakup of SpaceX’s Starship as it reentered Earth’s atmosphere near the Turks and Caicos Islands.
One clip, filmed by a passenger onboard a commercial flight near Florida and the Lucayan Archipelago, captures the rocket’s disintegration in a fiery cascade of debris streaking across the night sky.
Additional footage taken over the Bahamas shows glowing fragments tumbling towards the ocean, lighting up the darkness like a meteor shower.
Bret Bostwick was watching the launch with his children from a catamaran near Ragged Island in the Bahamas when the blast happened.
He told Sky News: “I was watching with my boys, seven and nine years old, and then all of a sudden, you know, boom!
“It just turned into a big ball of fire, actually no noise.
“So there wasn’t actually a boom at that point, but just a big ball of fire.
“And both my kids knew right away it had exploded again. We had seen Starship seven explode.
“So we’re kind of, I guess, little experts down here at detecting the explosion.”
The dad described the wreckage as looking “more like a big firework show with big streamers of different debris going down”, adding that “every chunk of the ship [seemed] to glow a different colour.”
The explosion triggered a ground stop at multiple Florida airports, delaying departures from Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Palm Beach, and Orlando by an average of 45 minutes.
The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) confirmed it had issued the notice due to “space launch debris” and would require SpaceX to carry out a mishap investigation into the loss of Starship.
SpaceX said in a statement: “During Starship’s ascent burn, the vehicle experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly and contact was lost.
“Our team immediately began coordination with safety officials to implement pre-planned contingency responses.
“We will review the data from today’s flight test to better understand root cause. As always, success comes from what we learn, and today’s flight will offer additional lessons to improve Starship’s reliability.”
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Despite the rocket’s failure, its Super Heavy booster successfully returned to the launch pad, caught by SpaceX’s giant mechanical arms as planned.
This is not the first time a Starship test flight has ended in an explosion.
In January, a launch failed eight minutes into flight, exploding over the Bahamas and scattering debris over the Turks and Caicos.
Musk said on X at the time: “Preliminary indication is that we had an oxygen/fuel leak in the cavity above the ship engine firewall that was large enough to build pressure in excess of the vent capacity.”
Putting a positive spin on the rocket failure, Musk also shared a video of the sky spectacle on with the upbeat caption: “Success is uncertain, but entertainment is guaranteed!”
Passenger jets were forced to swerve the red-hot and glowing remains of the exploded SpaceX rocket that rained across the sky.
And dozens of commercial flights had to divert to other airports or stray course to avoid the deadly path of debris, with one video capturing the spectacle from the cockpit of a plane.
The FAA is still investigating that failure — now adding another Starship mishap to its review.
