Starship — the huge spacecraft that Elon Musk says will one day take people to Mars — failed during its latest test flight on Thursday when its upper stage exploded in space, raining debris and disrupting air traffic at airports from Florida to Pennsylvania.
It was the second consecutive test flight of the most powerful rocket ever built where the upper-stage spacecraft malfunctioned. It started spinning out of control after several engines went out and then lost contact with mission control.
Photographs and videos posted on the social media site X by users saying they were along the Florida coast showed the spacecraft breaking up. The falling debris disrupted flights at airports in Miami, Orlando, Palm Beach and Fort Lauderdale, and as far away as Philadelphia International Airport.
The Starship rocket system is the largest ever built. At 403 feet tall, it is nearly 100 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty atop its pedestal.
It has the most engines ever in a rocket booster: The Super Heavy booster is powered by 33 of SpaceX’s Raptor engines. As those engines lift Starship off the launchpad, they will generate 16 million pounds of thrust at full throttle.
The upper part, also called Starship or Ship for short, looks like a shiny stainless steel rocket from science fiction movies of the 1950s. This is the upper stage that will head toward orbit, and ultimately could carry people to the moon or even Mars.
The rocket lifted off a little after 6:30 p.m. Eastern time on Thursday from the SpaceX site known as Starbase at the southern tip of Texas near the city of Brownsville.
Starship’s mammoth booster again successfully returned to the launchpad, just as it had during the previous test flight. In the last half minute before the upper-stage engines were to shut off, several of them malfunctioned. Video from the rocket showed a tumbling view of Earth and space until it cut off.
In an update posted on SpaceX’s website, the company said, “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. This in turn led to a loss of attitude control and ultimately a loss of communications with Starship.”
Communications with the spacecraft ended 9 minutes and 30 seconds after liftoff, SpaceX said.
The company said it immediately coordinated with safety officials “to implement pre-planned contingency responses.”
Shortly after the spacecraft broke up, the Federal Aviation Administration issued ground stoppage orders for the airports. It cited “space launch debris” as the reasons in each of the cases.
Some airlines said the effects of the incident had been limited on Thursday evening.
“We had some minor impacts on our South Florida operation, but things are getting back on track,” Southwest Airlines said in a statement.
The F.A.A. said it was grounding Starship until SpaceX completed an investigation of Thursday’s incident.
It was the eighth test flight for the rocket. During the previous test flight in January, the first part of the launch proceeded smoothly, with all 33 engines of the booster lifting the rocket toward space. The booster also separated properly, and the six engines of the second-stage spacecraft ignited, pushing it upward.
But something went wrong, and air traffic over the Caribbean had to be diverted and delayed around falling debris, some of which landed on the Turks and Caicos Islands.
In the first six tests, SpaceX demonstrated that the rocket’s basic design works and that the Starship can return to Earth almost intact. Over the coming year, SpaceX is looking to improve “more or less” to “reliably” and prove out other capabilities. The company is likely to receive approval from the F.A.A. for up to 25 flights this year.
The F.A.A. is trying to work around conflicts of interest with Mr. Musk and SpaceX.
The agency last month hired three SpaceX employees to work temporarily to help the agency upgrade the agency’s air traffic control system and other technology.
But ethics letters sent to the three employees assert that they “will not receive access to systems” at the Office of Commercial Space Transportation, which is the part of the F.A.A. that regulates SpaceX.
The demise of the previous Starship was likely caused by stronger-than-expected shaking when the rocket vibrated like an organ pipe, SpaceX’s investigation concluded. The vibrations caused leaks of propellant that ignited.
According to the company’s analysis, the self-destruct system blew up the rocket a few minutes later.
To address the problems during the seventh flight, the company said that feed lines carrying propellant to the engines were changed to reduce the oscillations. SpaceX also altered the propellant temperatures and thrust levels of the engines to avoid a repeat of the leaks.
For the rocket on this flight, SpaceX also added more vents to the attic section, and a system to purge the area of propellants in order to reduce the chance of fires.
The F.A.A. oversaw SpaceX’s investigation, and it issued a launch license last week for the eighth flight.
Scott Ferguson, 43, a neuroscientist and amateur astronomer who was eager observe the flight, positioned himself with a telescope in a parking lot near his home in Sarasota, Fla.
At about 6:40 p.m., he saw a large cloud suddenly appear through his telescope. A few seconds later, he said he saw one large piece of the craft’s body “surrounded by metallic debris that looked like stars twinkling all around it.”
A couple minutes later, Mr. Ferguson said he heard a loud bang that reminded him of the sonic booms that he heard growing up in Titusville, Fla., near NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. Additional booms followed about 10 minutes later.
Starship is not the only rocket flown by SpaceX that has had recent glitches. Some of the Falcon 9 rockets it launches from Florida and California every few days have also had problems.
During a launch in February, a Falcon 9 upper stage failed to execute the usual engine burn to ensure that the rocket’s remains would splash down in the ocean. Instead, it remained in orbit. Air resistance caused it to fall gradually, and the stage re-entered the atmosphere 18 days later over Europe. No one was hurt or injured, but pieces of the rocket appear to have landed in Poland.
SpaceX encountered another problem on Sunday night when a Falcon 9 booster successfully landed on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean but then fell over.
The company reported that “an off-nominal fire in the aft end of the rocket damaged one of the booster’s landing legs which resulted in it tipping over.”
NASA is planning to use a version of Starship to take astronauts from lunar orbit to the surface of the moon during its Artemis III mission, currently scheduled for 2027.
But that mission could be delayed, or even canceled, if the Trump administration revamps the moon program or shifts its attention to Mars.
SpaceX will need to demonstrate high reliability of Starship before a flight with people on board takes place.
Hank Sanders, Niraj Chokshi and Eric Lipton contributed reporting.
