SpaceX’s seventh test flight of its marquee rocket, Starship, ended with an unintentional fireworks show. That is, the rocket exploded over the Atlantic Ocean, raining a brilliant stream of debris down through Earth’s atmosphere.
It’s not clear what caused the explosion, but the event was captured on video by people on the ground and forced airplanes to divert course to avoid the superheated bits of falling rocketry.
Starship launched from SpaceX’s Starbase in Texas at 4:37 p.m. local time on Thursday. The company’s Mechazilla tower managed to catch the Starship’s huge (233-foot-tall, or 71-meter) Super Heavy booster rocket, a calling card of SpaceX’s bid to make spaceflight a more cost-effective and sustainable endeavor.
SpaceX lost telemetry with the vehicle before the burn stage was completed. This happened about 8.5 minutes into the flight. “Initial data indicates a fire developed in the aft section of the ship, leading to a rapid unscheduled disassembly,” according to a SpaceX release.
In other words, the rocket’s upper stage dramatically blew up in flight. Footage of the explosion and its aftermath looks like something out of science fiction: bright orange-yellow streaks of light passing through the sky like so many alien spacecraft might do. Observers on the ground in Turks & Caicos and passengers aboard cruise ships in the Caribbean Sea captured the dramatic footage.
Here’s the exact moment Ship 33 experienced a RUD. https://t.co/in2nZBWNV8 pic.twitter.com/iI7DtLiZlE
— Felix Space Time (@Space_Time3) January 16, 2025
But the explosive end to the rocket wasn’t merely a light show. The Federal Aviation Administration stated that it “briefly slowed and diverted aircraft around the area where space vehicle debris was falling,” with Starship’s remains creating a “dangerous area for falling debris.” Flight radar trackers showed a handful of aircraft about-facing east of Turks & Caicos around the time of the explosion.
CNBC reported that the FAA has not received any reports of injury or property damage, though flights were delayed and diverted as a result of the explosion. American Airlines told CNBC that it had fewer than 10 flights diverted, while Delta had four flights diverted. According to flight tracking sites, at least one cargo jet reversed course and one Spirit Airlines flight changed its tack. The chaos is understandable—no one wants an airliner to fly through rocket debris.
— andres (@_thatonedolphin) January 17, 2025
“Starship flew within its designated launch corridor – as all U.S. launches do to safeguard the public both on the ground, on water and in the air,” the SpaceX release added. “Any surviving pieces of debris would have fallen into the designated hazard area.”
On X—the social media platform owned by Musk—the multi-billionaire stated that “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.” Musk added that nothing about the way Flight 7 unfolded suggested the next Starship launch would need to be delayed past February.
On the ground, Starship’s seventh flight was a success. The Mechazilla tower’s chopstick-like arms successfully caught and secured the Super Heavy rocket booster out of the air. Skyward, the seventh flight was a failure. That’s what you call it when your rocket blows up and rains metal back down to Earth. But SpaceX will take it in stride. “Success comes from what we learn, and this flight test will help us improve Starship’s reliability as SpaceX seeks to make life multiplanetary,” the company’s release stated.
Relatedly, the Australian carrier Qantas has had to delay several flights between Australia and South Africa in recent weeks due to warnings of potential space debris related to SpaceX launches, as reported in The Guardian.
This latest incident could prompt a lengthy FAA inquiry. We’ve seen it before: Last year, SpaceX had to implement over a dozen corrective actions after an FAA investigation of its second Starship flight, in November 2023, among other investigations prompted by tests gone awry.
The company is undoubtedly making progress when it comes to flying reusable rockets. Starship is a solid launch vehicle—as evidenced by NASA investing in Starship for its Artemis program to put humans back on the Moon.
But SpaceX has blown past its tentative goals of getting humans to Mars in 2022 and flying a billionaire and a handful of artists around the Moon (2023). As Inverse reported, 2025 is the earliest time that Elon Musk previously stated a colony on Mars could be established, with a settlement on the arid, frigid, and dusty world by the end of the decade. Clock’s ticking, Mr. Musk.
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