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SpaceX just took to the social media platform X to rehash what happened today: Starship experienced a “rapid unscheduled disassembly.”
That’s a favored SpaceX euphemism for an explosion or unplanned destruction of a launch vehicle.
Starship experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly during its ascent burn. Teams will continue to review data from today’s flight test to better understand root cause.
With a test like this, success comes from what we learn, and today’s flight will help us improve Starship’s…
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) January 16, 2025
It’s not clear how, when or why the Starship spacecraft exploded. The vehicle is equipped with a “flight termination system,” which is designed to blow the vehicle to smithereens if it begins to veer off course. Breaking it apart is designed to ensure that large chunks of the rocket don’t pose a threat to people or property.
We saw that self destruct feature in action on SpaceX’s first couple Starship test flights.
It’s now been a little over 20 minutes since liftoff — and nearly that long since the Starship spacecraft delivered any data.
“We can confirm that we did lose the ship,” said SpaceX engineer Kate Tice.
Communications manager Dan Huot added: “We obviously need to go through all the data. It’s going to take some time. In the next hours, days — we’re going to figure out exactly what happened, come back, fly the next one, get farther.
“Reminder,” he added. “It’s a test of an experimental vehicle.”
SpaceX spokesperson Dan Huot confirmed that it is safe to assume that Starship — which was packed with upgrades it was testing for the first time on this flight — did not survive.
“At this point, we are assuming that the ship has been lost,” he said. “But there’s a lot of things you’re going to learn as all those systems are now interacting with each other for the first time.”
While Super Heavy is already safely back home in the arms of its launch tower, the Starship spacecraft — which is meant to lap Earth and splash down in the Indian Ocean — has stopped delivering telemetry.
“We were expecting ship engine cut off about 40 seconds ago,” said SpaceX spokesperson Dan Huot on the live stream. “We saw some of those engines start to go out prior to that point. And so right now we are just standing by to try and get the latest word on where we are.”
Graphics on the SpaceX webcast show only one of the Starship’s six engines were lit up at the time that the vehicle stopped sharing data.
For the second time, SpaceX has successfully guided the Super Heavy booster back to a landing at the launch site — making a pinpoint, mid-air touchdown between two extended arms, or “chopsticks,” attached to the Mechazilla tower.
Perfecting this maneuver is crucial for SpaceX. The company aims to routinely land and rapidly refly Super Heavy boosters — and, eventually, Starship spacecraft.
The Super Heavy booster just intentionally broke away from the Starship spacecraft.
SpaceX calls the method by which this is accomplished “hot staging” because Starship fires its engines to push itself away from Super Heavy — rather than using pneumatic pushers like SpaceX’s Falcon rockets.
It’s essentially separation by blunt force trauma.
The gargantuan Starship and Super Heavy just hit Max Q — a pivotol moment during any rocket launch.
Max Q is the point of maximum aerodynamic pressure. It occurs at the time that rocket is moving quite fast when the atmosphere is still fairly thick — amounting to intense pressure.
Essentially, it’s a moment in time when the atmosphere is trying its best to squish the rocket.
The 232-foot (71-meter) Super Heavy booster just lit its 33 engines. The Starship, riding atop the booster, is now en route to space.
The next big milestone to watch for will come up in just a couple minutes: The Super Heavy will shut down its engines and begin steering itself back toward the launch site, aiming to make a safe landing into the arms of SpaceX’s launch tower — called Mechazilla.
If successful, it would mark only the second time SpaceX has accomplished such a feat.
Starship will go on to finish its mission as it soars through space and attempts to re-light an engine.
Flight controllers just gave the official greenlight for Starship to fire up its engines and kick off today’s test misison.
Starship is expected to take flight in just 30 seconds.
Starbase lies next to Boca Chica Beach, a strip of coastline on the Gulf of Mexico that lies at the southernmost tip of Texas.
Only one roadway runs in and out of the area: A narrow stretch of asphalt called Boca Chica Highway. The westbound lane includes a US Border Patrol checkpoint.
Before SpaceX moved in, there were only a couple dozen homes nearby in an area called Boca Chica Village. And locals from the neighboring city of Brownsville routinely trekked to Boca Chica Beach to enjoy the rare slice of untouched coastline.
Most longtime residents have since been pushed out. SpaceX purchased and painted many of the homes, allowing employees to move in. And launchpads now lie mere steps from the sand.
SpaceX also has repeatedly drawn the ire of environmentalists who say the company has disregarded local wildlife and violated conservation laws. (The company has denied the allegations.)
SpaceX may also face pushback over the sonic booms that the Super Heavy rocket booster can blast over the area as it heads for landing. The Federal Aviation Administration recently held public hearings for area residents to voice concerns.
Today SpaceX will attempt to put a unique and daring concept to the test — perhaps notching a second success in returning the Super Heavy booster back to a safe landing at the launch tower mere minutes after liftoff.
If all goes according to plan, once it separates from the Starship spacecraft, the Super Heavy booster will steer itself into the arms of Mechazilla, a massive structure back at SpaceX’s launch site that the company designed to catch rockets mid-air as they head in for landing.
The tower was dubbed “Mechazilla” by SpaceX CEO Elon Musk for its likeness to a metallic Godzilla.
The structure’s arms, or “chopsticks,” can be used to stack and move boosters and spacecraft at the launch site before takeoff as well as snag a rocket as it maneuvers to land, according to SpaceX.
Though the maneuver worked successfully during SpaceX’s fifth test launch in October, the company abandoned a second attempt to land the booster during a November test flight because of issues back at the ground pad.
But SpaceX indicated that it’s hopes are higher for this launch, noting in a web post that hardware “upgrades to the launch and catch tower will increase reliability for booster catch.” The upgrades include better protection for sensors on the Mechazilla tower that the company said were damaged during takeoff in November, leading SpaceX to divert to an ocean landing for the booster.
Either by Mechazilla capture or ocean splashdown, the Super Heavy’s landing will occur about seven minutes after liftoff.
After the Starship spacecraft separates from the Super Heavy booster — just a couple minutes after liftoff — the Starship lights up its own six engines and continues firing itself closer to the speeds necessary to enter orbit around Earth.
Starship won’t actually go into orbit, as that’s not one of the goals of this test flight.
But the company will experiment with firing up one of the Starship’s own six Raptor engines for a second time after the initial burn that takes the spacecraft to aggressively faster speeds. That will build on a successful engine re-light test that SpaceX carried out on its last flight in November.
Being able to reignite an engine after it’s already fired once — and as it’s traveling through space — will be crucial to SpaceX figuring out the fuller picture of how Starship will eventually carry out more complex missions that reach Earth’s orbit, or even deeper into space.
“This is really important, something they haven’t done before,” said former NASA astronaut Garrett Reisman, who is now a SpaceX consultant and professor at the University of Southern California’s Viterbi School of Engineering, ahead of the November launch. “These Raptor engines, are what we call ‘stage combustion engines.’ They’re very similar to the engines that we had on (NASA’s) space shuttle, although they work with different propellants and they’re complicated engines.
“They’re finicky little beasts, and it’s not so easy to light them up and shut them down and light them up again,” Reisman told CNN.
SpaceX just confirmed that launch controllers have given the green light to begin filling up Starship and Super Heavy with propellant.
Together, Starship and Super Heavy can hold more than 10 million pounds of liquid oxygen and methane.
SpaceX said it will begin a live broadcast of Starship’s test flight beginning about 30 minutes before takeoff.
The stream will appear on SpaceX’s website and X account.
According to a timestamp on the stream, the webcast should kick off at 4:57 p.m. ET. That would put liftoff time at just before 5:30 p.m. ET (4:30 p.m. local time.)
SpaceX has always made a big deal about steering rocket boosters back to a safe landing after launch so that the vehicles can be refurbished and flown again — driving down the cost of each rocket launch.
But while SpaceX has mastered the rocket booster landing maneuver with its smaller workhorse rocket, the Falcon 9, the company cannot yet recover and re-fly the second stage boosters. So only the bottom roughly 60% of the rocket is flown more than once.
Starship aims to change that — making both the Super Heavy booster that gives the first burst of power at liftoff and the upper Starship rocket and spacecraft recoverable and reusable.
“This is the vehicle and the system that will make flying rockets much more like flying airplanes,” SpaceX COO Gwynne Shotwell said during a conference in November. “Think about what life would be like if aircraft were one-time (use).”
Today’s rocket launch double feature includes flights from Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
And while both companies are similar in that they were formed in the early aughts and are helmed by the world’s richest men — they have very different approaches to rocket development.
SpaceX embraces an engineering philosophy called “rapid spiral development.” It’s a methodology that embraces, well, moving fast and breaking things.
Musk’s company likes to rapidly build relatively cheap rocket prototypes, stick them on the launchpad, and learn from how they fail — hence why the public has seen so many SpaceX rockets explode in the early stages of development.
Blue Origin, on the other hand, uses methods that are more similar to NASA and other legacy aerospace companies. The Bezos-funded company relies more on slow, methodical approaches that value extensive ground tests and design evaluations — a big reason why it took Blue Origin more than a decade to get its orbital rocket New Glenn from the drawing board to the launchpad. (But New Glenn also had a fairly pristine maiden flight.)
Evidence of that preference: Blue Origin’s mascot is a tortoise, paying homage to the “slow and steady wins the race” mantra. The company’s motto is also “Gradatim ferociter” — a latin phrase that means “step by step, ferociously.”
“We believe slow is smooth and smooth is fast,” Bezos said in 2016. Those comments could be seen as an attempt to position Blue Origin as the anti-SpaceX.
SpaceX will once again attempt to guide a Super Heavy booster back to a safe landing in the arms of Mechazilla — a feat the company accomplished once before during an October test flight and one SpaceX must master as it gears up to fly operational Starship missions.
One issue that may bother local residents, however, is that Super Heavy sends out an earsplitting sonic boom upon its return.
CNN spoke to researchers who monitored noise levels at the October flight.
The sound, detectable miles away at a popular tourist destination, was as loud as a gunshot at close range, the researchers reported in a study that published in November.
“It truly was one of the loudest things I’ve ever heard or experienced,” said Noah Pulsipher, student at Brigham Young University and a coauthor of the recent study about the noise associated with the Starship launch.
The sonic booms associated with the booster landing maneuver could raise new environmental concerns for a rocket development program already mired in them. Sonic boom-related issues may include potential hearing damage for people nearby and minor structural problems for buildings in the area near the Gulf of Mexico.
“I think this has to be carefully watched,” said Dr. Victor Sparrow, a professor and director of the graduate program in acoustics at Penn State who was not involved in the study. “Some people are more sensitive (to noise), and for those sensitive people, this could be a problem for them.
Read more about sonic booms here.
Perhaps the most interesting new goal SpaceX will chase on today’s test flight: The company plans to attempt to deploy 10 satellite “simulators” from the Starship spacecraft.
Because Starship is not equipped with a nose cone, or payload fairing, as most other rockets are, the satellites will likely need to be ejected from a special hatch or doors. It may be similar to the method NASA’s Space Shuttle used to unleash spacecraft.
SpaceX said the satellite simulators used on today’s flight will be “similar in size and weight” to the company’s next generation of Starlink internet satellites.
Note, however, that the simulators will not actually stay in space. Instead, they’ll travel on a suborbital path, much like the Starship spacecraft itself, which is slated to splash down in the Indian Ocean about one hour after takeoff.
SpaceX is testing out some major upgrades to the Starship spacecraft, which the company often refers to simply as “the ship.” It rides atop the Super Heavy booster at liftoff.
Here’s what’s included in the suite of upgrades:
- The spaceship’s propulsion system has been altered to increase the propellant volume by 25% — making the spacecraft about 2 meters taller. (The company previously said Starship can hold about 2.6 million pounds of oxidizer and fuel.)
- Starship is also outfitted with a brand new avionics, which is the system that guides, navigates and monitors the spacecraft during flight. SpaceX said it implemented a “complete redesign.”
- That upgrade includes “a more powerful flight computer, integrated antennas” — which allow Starship to communicate via Starlink and other space-based communication networks — as well as “redesigned inertial navigation and star tracking sensors, integrated smart batteries and power units.”
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has publicly sparred with Bezos, his space industry rival. He’s taken to social media to call Bezos a “copy cat.” He’s mocked the company’s lunar lander design. And the two have debated who tackled the rocket booster landing game first.
Bezos and Musk have also butted heads in a purely business sense, as SpaceX and Amazon are slated to compete in the satellite internet business, and Bezos’ Blue Origin is challenging SpaceX’s dominance in the lucrative market for launch contracts.
(For the record, Musk has always maintained that he welcomes competition and detests monopolies.)
But after Blue Origin debuted New Glenn — the company’s first rocket capable of reaching orbit — in the early hours of Thursday morning, Musk has been on a congratulatory, meme-laden tear of social media posts directed at Bezos.
Musk’s posts on X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter that Musk purchased in 2022, have likened his relationship to Bezos to that of Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly’s characters in the 2008 comedy “Stepbrothers.”
Step Brothers is the perfect meme for @JeffBezos & me 🤣🤣
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 16, 2025
Actual footage of @ElonMusk & @JeffBezos at the Catalina Wine Mixer
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 16, 2025
Musk has also been reminiscing.
Both multibillionaires have been in the space game for more than two decades. Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000, while Musk started SpaceX in 2002.
Wow, a lot has happened in 21 years! https://t.co/QNoOWuIfLP
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 16, 2025
Bezos also responded to Musk’s sentiments on the New Glenn launch by offering well wishes to SpaceX on today’s Starship flight.
Good luck today @elonmusk and the whole spacex team!!
— Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) January 16, 2025
Both Bezos and Musk — who has closely aligned himself with President-elect Donald Trump and has been given substantial power on his transition team — are expected to attend the presidential inauguration on Monday.
