SpaceX Rocket Falls Apart During Test Flight After Booster Caught

SpaceX's mega rocket Starship launches for a test flight from Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas, on Jan. 16, 2025. Eric Gay/AP Photo

The seventh test of SpaceX’s unmanned Starship lit up the sky when it went awry.

After the 403-foot-long megarocket lifted off from a site in southern Texas, the launch tower’s “chopstick arms” successfully caught its returning booster engine.

About eight-and-a-half minutes into the Jan. 16 flight, the upper half of the rocket experienced what the company calls a “RUD”—“rapid unscheduled disassembly.”

Some onlookers captured in videos the moment when a tiny white dot in the sky went supernova before falling to Earth.

A video posted on X showed the fall of debris in multicolored streaks over the Turks and Caicos Islands, a British Overseas Territory east of Cuba.

On X—which, like SpaceX, is owned by Elon Musk—the company wrote that the partly unsuccessful flight “will help us improve Starship’s reliability.”

“Teams will continue to review data from today’s flight test to better understand root cause,” the company wrote.

A spokesman for SpaceX, Dan Huot, said that a full accounting of causes would come following a closer look at the data.

“We are obviously bummed out about ship,” he said.

Musk took to his social media platform to comment on a video of the space junk in descent.

“Success is uncertain, but entertainment is guaranteed!” he wrote.

In a postmortem of the incident, Musk said that oxygen or fuel leakage had likely caused pressure to build up.

“Nothing so far suggests pushing next launch past next month,” he wrote.

SpaceX was using the flight to assess an improved version of its Starship equipped with dummy satellites on the scale of satellites used by Starlink, Musk’s satellite internet constellation.

The Jan. 16 incident isn’t the first such challenge for the pioneering private space firm.

In 2016, one of SpaceX’s rockets exploded on a Florida launchpad. Its cargo was an Israeli communications satellite intended to boost Internet availability in Africa.

More recently, in 2024, the upper stage of one of the company’s Falcon 9 rockets failed to finish its second burn while delivering Starlink Internet satellites. Their resulting orbit was too low and eccentric to keep them up.

“The satellites will reenter Earth’s atmosphere and fully demise. They do not pose a threat to other satellites in orbit or to public safety,” SpaceX wrote in a statement on that incident.

Prototypes of Starship suffered multiple RUDs. SpaceX’s SN8 Starship prototype exploded in late 2020. Other prototypes failed in early 2021. In May of that year, the company successfully launched, and landed, the SN15 Starship prototype, the first version that remained intact.

The billionaire entrepreneur hopes to someday reach Mars.

The Associated Press contributed to this reporting.