SpaceX’s Starship rocket broke up in reentry on Tuesday afternoon after losing control of its altitude following a fuel leak, among other missed opportunities.
The company’s previous two rocket tests ended with the spacecraft exploding, though the boosters from each craft were able to touch down.
After a celebrated launch that saw mission control clap and cheer, little went right for SpaceX.
One of the spacecraft’s Super Heavy boosters, which was being reused for the first time, exploded moments before it was supposed to splash down. Later in the flight, the spacecraft’s cargo bay would not fully open, preventing it from deploying dummy Starlink boosters.
Though the rocket made it further than any other test flight this year, it met its demise when it began to spin following a fuel leak, as CEO Elon Musk would later confirm. It vented all the remaining propellant onboard before it “experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly” in reentry, as the company called it.
“As if the flight test was not exciting enough, Starship experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly,” the company said in a post on X. “Teams will continue to review data and work toward our next flight test. With a test like this, success comes from what we learn, and today’s test will help us improve Starship’s reliability as SpaceX seeks to make life multiplanetary,” it wrote.
Parts of the ship appeared to melt as it reentered Earth’s atmosphere.
Pretty excellent melting shot in the last moments of Starship pic.twitter.com/vebHysj6XE
— johnboiles (@johnboiles) May 28, 2025
Musk appeared to celebrate the flight’s progress in a post on his social media platform.
“Starship made it to the scheduled ship engine cutoff, so big improvement over last flight! Also, no significant loss of heat shield tiles during ascent. Leaks caused loss of main tank pressure during the coast and re-entry phase. Lot of good data to review. Launch cadence for next 3 flights will be faster, at approximately 1 every 3 to 4 weeks,” he wrote.
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The next scheduled flight will be the 10th test flight of Starship, which SpaceX hopes will one day take humanity to the moon and Mars.
“The last two months have been an absolute, like, gauntlet for a lot of people, and we’re continuing to learn more about this ship and about this rocket,” Dan Huot, a SpaceX commentator, said on the company’s live broadcast. “We are trying to do something that is impossibly hard.”
