The fuel booster from SpaceX Starship’s seventh mission was successfully caught by mechanical arms at the company’s Boca Chica, Texas, Starbase Thursday. The segment carrying the payload exploded over the Caribbean Sea near the Turks and Caicos. Photo by Michael Gonzales/EPA-EFE
A SpaceX Starship’s upper stage exploded minutes after launch from Texas on Thursday, and the rocket was declared a “loss” in the seventh test flight of the heavy-lift spacecraft. The mission was unmanned.
Videos on social media appear to show the upper stage of the craft exploding over the Caribbean near the Turks and Caicos region, sending flaming streams of debris overhead. It was not clear where the debris landed. The fireballs likely were pieces of debris burning as they re-entered Earth’s atmosphere, officials said. Advertisement
“We can confirm that we did lose the ship,” senior manager of quality systems engineering Kate Tice said on the SpaceX live feed about 24 minutes after the launch. SpaceX said it lost contact with the ship at 8 minutes, 24 seconds into the flight.
A similar incident occurred on the second test launch of the Starship in 2024.
The Starship was carrying a batch of satellite simulators designed to mimic the next generation of Starlink satellites, which are expected to be bigger and heavier. This was the seventh of 10 planned Starship test flights.
SpaceX was successful Thursday in catching Starship’s returning fuel booster stage at 6 minutes 56 seconds after launch. It did so with a pair of mechanical arms on the launch tower that the company refers to as “chopsticks.” Advertisement
The company launched the Starship on Thursday from SpaceX’s Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas.
