SpaceX's Starship fails mid-flight in ninth test mission

Six healthy Raptors running on Ship, on its way to space,

a commentator said excitedly, referring to its powerful engines

Developmental testing by definition is unpredictable, ... but every lesson learned marks progress toward Starship’s goal of enabling life to become multiplanetary."

SpaceX said in a statement

With a test like this, success comes from what we learn,

SpaceX said after the mission

Elon Muskchief executive

Starship made it to the scheduled ship engine cutoff, so big improvement over last flight!"

Musk wrote

Elon Muskchief executive

Launch cadence for the next 3 flights will be faster - approximately one every 3 to 4 weeks.

Musk added

We have been dealing with some leaks on the ship…This is also what led to that loss of attitude control,

Huot said

First reflight of a Super Heavy booster! Today’s test objectives were designed to intentionally push Super Heavy to the limits, giving us real-world data about its performance that will directly feed in to making the next generation booster even more capable.”

After the test flight failure, SpaceX said

As if the flight test was not exciting enough, Starship experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly. 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 said

We will not be aligned as we wanted it to be aligned for re-entry,

a SpaceX commentator said during the livestream

Developmental testing by definition is unpredictable,

SpaceX stated on their website

Not looking great with a lot of our on-orbit objectives for today,

said SpaceX flight commentator Dan Huot

Teams will continue to review data and work toward our next flight test,

the company said in an online statement

Just to confirm, we did lose contact with the ship officially a couple of minutes ago. So that brings an end to the ninth flight test,

said SpaceX's Dan Huot during a live feed

Tim DoddyouTuber

By far most important thing is high heating phase of re-entry and seeing how the tiles perform. Think of this as a tiles mission,

he told YouTuber Tim Dodd

This was a different failure than we saw on flight seven, and the fixes that we put in place did work as expected, so this was a new issue on flight eight,

Anderson said on SpaceX’s livestream

As we are not able to control the attitude of the Ship as we get into entry, it will enter in whatever orientation it is in at the time, which does not bode well for the Ship’s heat shield,

Huot said

No matter what, we are going to enter. However, this lowers the chance of this as a controlled re-entry,

SpaceX communications manager Dan Huot said on the livestream

Starship experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly,

SpaceX posted on X — a familiar euphemism for fiery failure — while stressing it would learn from the setback

I know in science there's never a failure, you learn everything from every single test so that was still super exciting to see,

said Joshua Wingate, a 33-year-old tech entrepreneur from Austin, after the launch

We have lost attitude control,

SpaceX spokesperson Dan Huot announced during the company's live broadcast