SpaceX pulled off its “chopsticks” catch of a Super Heavy rocket booster but lost the Starship spacecraft on Thursday during the vehicle’s seventh uncrewed test flight.

Eyewitnesses of the SpaceX blast captured footage of glowing orange fragments streaking through the sky near Port-Au-Prince, Haiti, leaving smoky trails in their wake.

Starship experienced a "rapid unscheduled disassembly," which is a phrase SpaceX coined to describe an explosion.

Starship Meteor Shower SpaceX's Starship has exploded into countless pieces of space junk as it reentered the atmosphere over the Caribbean. The company's seventh test flight has ended in a potential disaster,

SpaceX launched Starship on Thursday for a seventh test flight, after weather concerns pushed back an experiment that will feature the spacecraft’s first payload deployment test, and while it successfully caught the Super Heavy Booster,

After the successful booster recovery, SpaceX officials reported losing contact with the spaceship toward the end of the ascend.

In the early morning hours of Dec. 31, 2024, SpaceX ended its year as it began it, with one final launch of Starlink satellites into orbit. The launch marked SpaceX's 134th mission of the year (138 missions if you count Starship test flights).

SpaceX has traced the likely cause of the explosion that destroyed its Starship vehicle during its Jan. 16 test flight to a leak of liquid oxygen or liquid methane.

On Friday, the FAA issued a mishap investigation against SpaceX after the upper stage of the Starship lost communications and then blew up during its seventh test flight on Thursday minutes after its launch from the company’s Starbase facility in Boca Chica, Texas.

After SpaceX’s Starship exploded over Turks and Caicos on Thursday, the FAA launched an investigation, demanding answers into the mishap.

The "rapid unscheduled disassembly" was likely caused by a propellant leak, Elon Musk said, and was captured on video by spectators on the ground.