Written by Joey Roulette

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A SpaceX Starship rocket exploded in space minutes after launching from Texas on Thursday, forcing flights over the Gulf of Mexico to change course to avoid falling debris and disrupting pioneering Elon Musk’s rocket program.

SpaceX’s mission control lost contact with the newly upgraded Starship vehicle, which was carrying its first test payload of dummy satellites but no crew, eight minutes after liftoff from its South Texas rocket facility at 5:38 p.m. EDT (2238 GMT).

A video clip taken by Reuters showed orange balls of light streaming across the sky over the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince, leaving trails of smoke behind them.

“We lost all communications with the ship, so that basically tells us that we have an upper stage anomaly,” SpaceX communications director Dan Hout said, confirming minutes later that the ship was lost.

The last time a Starship’s upper stage failed was in March of last year, as it was reentering Earth’s atmosphere over the Indian Ocean, but rarely has a SpaceX accident caused widespread air traffic disruption.

Dozens of commercial flights were diverted to other airports or rerouted to avoid potential debris, according to flight tracking website FlightRadar24. She added that flights departing from Miami and Fort Lauderdale airports in Florida were also delayed by about 45 minutes.

The Federal Aviation Administration, which regulates private launch activities, said it briefly slowed the planes and diverted them around the area where space debris is falling, but operations have since resumed normally.

The FAA regularly closes airspace for launches and re-entries into space, but can create a “debris response zone” to prevent aircraft from entering if the spacecraft encounters an anomaly outside the already closed area.

SpaceX CEO Musk posted a video on the X website showing the debris field and said: “Success is uncertain, but entertainment is guaranteed!”

This failure came one day after Blue Origin, the space company owned by Amazon’s billionaire founder, Jeff Bezos, succeeded in launching its giant New Glenn rocket into orbit for the first time.

“New generation ship”

Starship’s upper stage, two meters (6.56 feet) taller than previous versions, was a “new-generation ship with significant upgrades,” SpaceX said in a mission description ahead of the test. It was scheduled to make a controlled landing in the Indian Ocean about an hour after its launch from Texas.

Musk said an initial assessment of the failure showed that an internal leak of liquid oxygen fuel increased pressure and led to the rocket disintegrating.

The FAA will likely open an unfortunate investigation that would result in grounding the Starship vehicle — as the agency has done in the past — and examining whether any of the debris from the rocket’s mid-flight explosion fell on populated areas or outside a predetermined danger zone. For Starship.

The mishap threatens to derail Musk’s goal of launching at least 12 Starship test launches this year, depending on how quickly SpaceX implements fixes and whether the FAA opens an investigation into the incident.

“Nothing yet indicates that the next launch will be postponed until next month,” Musk said.

The billionaire, who was appointed to a new position to cut government costs by incoming President Donald Trump, has repeatedly criticized the FAA for overreaching and making politically motivated decisions.

Musk called on FAA Chairman Mike Whitaker to resign in September, shortly after the FAA fined SpaceX and postponed one of the launches. Whitaker said in December that he would step down before the start of Trump’s term. No replacement has been named.

Thursday’s mission was SpaceX’s seventh Starship test since 2023 as part of Musk’s multibillion-dollar effort to build a rocket capable of transporting humans and cargo to Mars, as well as deploying large constellations of satellites into Earth’s orbit.

SpaceX’s development approach based on testing to failure has included spectacular failures in the past as the company pushed Starship prototypes to their engineering limits. However, Thursday’s test failure occurred during a mission previously conducted by SpaceX.

Meanwhile, the towering Super Heavy rocket returned to the launch pad about seven minutes after liftoff, as planned, slowing its descent from space by restarting its Raptor engines while attached to giant mechanical arms attached to the launch tower.