Starship flight 9: Here's what happened during SpaceX's latest test of mega rocket

• The Starship vehicle still met an untimely end when it spun out of control about halfway through its flight without achieving some of its most important objectives.
• The test came to an end as Elon Musk, a close ally of President Donald Trump, looks to ramp up development of a spacecraft critical to U.S. spaceflight ambitions.
• In the years ahead, Starship is due to play a pivotal role in transporting astronauts to the moon's surface and may one day ferry the first humans to Mars.

The latest flight of SpaceX's massive Starship launch vehicle went off from South Texas, but not without a hitch.

For billionaire Elon Musk and his commercial spaceflight company, the stakes were high. SpaceX had endured setbacks in development of the massive rocket when the previous two Starship launches both ended with the spacecraft's upper portion exploding and raining down debris over the Atlantic Ocean.

This time around, the upper stage vehicle, simply known as Starship, streaked through suborbital space following the uncrewed launch Tuesday, May 27 – far surpassing the previous 2025 flights in January and March. But the Starship vehicle still met an untimely end when it spun out of control about halfway through its flight without achieving some of its most important objectives.

Still, the test came to an end as Musk, a close ally of President Donald Trump, looks to ramp up development of a spacecraft critical to U.S. spaceflight ambitions. In the years ahead, Starship is due to play a pivotal role in transporting astronauts to the moon's surface and may one day ferry the first humans to Mars.

Here's a recap of what happened during Starship's latest test mission, referred to as flight 9.

Starship flight 9: Here's what happened

The Starship launch vehicle lifted off as planned around 7:37 p.m. ET from Starbase, SpaceX's company town in Boca Chica about 23 miles from Brownsville near the U.S.-Mexico border.

The mission got off to a positive start, with the successful first-ever launch of a rocket booster – known as Super Heavy – that had flown during a previous flight in January. Reusing a booster was an important milestone for SpaceX to demonstrate that the rocket can be flown multiple times.

The Starship spacecraft managed to seperate from the booster and fire its six Raptor engines to propel itself on a trajectory taking it into space as it soared around the world.

But contact with Starship was lost approximately 46 minutes into the flight as it spun out of control and once again came apart. The debris fell into the Indian Ocean, far from inhabited areas, SpaceX said.

The company was also once again unable to deploy test Starlink satellites.

As for the Super Heavy booster, SpaceX lost contact with the lower-stage during its descent about six minutes after launch.

In three different test missions since October 2024, SpaceX has successfully flown and caught the booster back at the launch site using a pair of mechanical arms nicknamed "chopsticks." This time, SpaceX had no plans to recover the booster as it instead sought to push its performance beyond what has so far been attempted.

But rather than making a controlled splashdown as planned, the booster came apart in the air – what SpaceX refers to as "a rapid unscheduled disassembly" – and plummeted into the Gulf of Mexico, which the U.S. government has renamed as the Gulf of America.

Elon Musk says SpaceX to ramp up Starship launches

In a post on X, Musk touted Starship's scheduled shutdown of an engine in space, a step previous test flights achieved last year. The tech mogul added that the problems with the spacecraft appeared to be due to leaks on Starship's primary fuel tank that led to it losing control.

Coming up, SpaceX is planning to increase the number of Starship launches after receiving key regulatory approval to conduct 25 flight tests a year. Just four Starship test missions were conducted in 2024.

"Lot of good data to review," Musk said. "Launch cadence for next 3 flights will be faster, at approximately 1 every 3 to 4 weeks."

Musk had been scheduled to give a speech at Starbase about his space exploration vision for Starship ahead of the launch before he postponed it until after the test flight. But Musk never gave the presentation, which SpaceX had billed as a livestream event.

What is Starship?

SpaceX is developing Starship to be a fully reusable transportation system, meaning both the rocket and vehicle can return to the ground for additional missions. In the years ahead, Starship is intended to carry both cargo and humans to Earth's orbit and deeper into the cosmos.

NASA's lunar exploration plans, which appear to be in jeopardy under President Donald Trump's proposed budget, call for Artemis III astronauts aboard the Orion capsule to board the Starship while in orbit for a ride to the moon's surface.

But Musk is more preoccupied with Starship reaching Mars – potentially, he has claimed, by the end of 2026. Under his vision, human expeditions aboard the Starship could then follow in the years after the first uncrewed spacecraft reaches the Red Planet.

How big is Starship?

Starship is regarded as the world’s largest and most powerful launch vehicle ever developed.

At more than 400 total feet in height, Starship towers over SpaceX's famous Falcon 9 rocket – one of the world's most active – which stands at nearly 230 feet.

The launch vehicle is composed of both a 232-foot Super Heavy rocket and the 171-foot upper stage spacecraft, or capsule where crew and cargo would ride.

Super Heavy alone is powered by 33 of SpaceX’s Raptor engines that give the initial burst of thrust at liftoff. The upper section, also called Starship or Ship for short, is the upper stage powered by six Raptor engines that will ultimately travel in orbit.

What happened in previous 2025 Starship flight tests?

SpaceX was unable to repeat the successes of previous flights in its first two Starship test missions of 2025. For three tests between June and November 2024, Starship flew halfway around the world before reentering Earth's atmosphere and splashing down as planned in the Indian Ocean.

But in both January and March 2025, the vehicles used in the tests instead met their demise in dramatic explosions that sent cascades of fiery debris streaking across the sky in Caribbean countries and Florida – disrupting air traffic.

In both cases, the upper stage, the vehicle where astronauts and cargo would ride, came apart mere minutes into its flight during the ascent.

While both explosions occurred at about the same point in the flight, the e causes were “distinctly different,” SpaceX said in an update May 22. In the latest fiery mishap in March, it wasn't a fire in the attic, but rather a "flash" closer to the bottom section that caused  "an energetic event" that led the vehicle to shut down, lose communication and trigger its own self destruction, SpaceX determined.

As a result, the Federal Aviation Administration, which licenses commercial launches, expanded the size of the hazard zones for flight 9 designating areas for aircraft to avoid.

Contributing: Anthony Robledo, USA TODAY; Reuters

Eric Lagatta is the Space Connect reporter for the USA TODAY Network. Reach him at [email protected]