SpaceX's new-generation Starship explodes after taking off on its latest test flight

• SpaceX launched its Starship mega-rocket for the seventh time on Thursday.
• It performed an epic booster catch for the second time but the Starship exploded shortly after.
• The launch marked the first flight of a new-generation Starship.

SpaceX Starship mega-rocket has stumbled on the road to commercial use, unexpectedly dropping out of communications and exploding as it screamed toward space for its seventh flight on Thursday.

The mishap occurred on the same day SpaceX rival Blue Origin, owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos, successfully launched its New Glenn rocket into orbit.

What happened to the Starship

After liftoff, the rocket's Super Heavy booster heaved the Starship spaceship toward space, separated itself, and fell back toward Earth. As the falling booster approached SpaceX's Texas facilities, it nailed a complex maneuver that's only happened once before.

The booster fired its engines to lower itself to a catch tower, where a pair of giant "chopstick" arms closed around its trunk and caught it.

This technological feat is key to reaching SpaceX's goal of building a fleet of rapidly, fully reusable rockets to help slash spaceflight costs, advance the company's business model, and ultimately build a city of people on Mars.

However, shortly after the epic booster catch, SpaceX said the upper stage of the system, Starship itself, was lost and later confirmed on X that it had suffered a rapid unscheduled disassembly, which is another way of saying it exploded.

"We were just coming up to the end of that ascent burn for the ship when we started to lose a couple of the engines," Dan Huot, one of the hosts of SpaceX's livestream of the launch, said in the broadcast.

Then the ship dropped out of communications, meaning there was some kind of anomaly and Starship was lost, Huot said.

"This was a brand new vehicle essentially," he added. "With that, there's a lot of things you're upgrading, 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."

Dean Olson, who captured footage of the Starship debris while he was in Turks and Caicos, told Business Insider that he heard the sound of constant "thunder" for about a minute after witnessing the explosion.

"I'm just walking out of the restaurant holding a cocktail, and I just looked up," Olson said. "Everyone's breath is kind of just taken away."

"Nobody knew what was going on," he added. "There was a lot of people panicking, to be honest with you."

Musk later said in an X post on Thursday night that preliminary indicators suggest Starship "had an oxygen/fuel leak in the cavity above the ship engine firewall that was large enough to build pressure in excess of the vent capacity."

"Apart from obviously double-checking for leaks, we will add fire suppression to that volume and probably increase vent area. Nothing so far suggests pushing next launch past next month," Musk added.

Elon Musk, SpaceX's founder and CEO, posted on X shortly after Starship's explosion that "improved versions of the ship & booster already waiting for launch."

Blue Origin coincidentally lost New Glenn's booster during Thursday morning's test flight.

"Kudos to you and the whole SpaceX team on the flawless booster catch! Very impressive," Bezos posted on X in response to Musk.

SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

SpaceX's Starship flight 7 didn't achieve all it set out to

For the first time, SpaceX flew Starship with a reused Raptor rocket engine.

The Super Heavy booster runs on 33 Raptor engines. For the entire rocket to be reusable, as Musk has said he intends, then those engines must be recycled and reused too.

Aboard Thursday's flight, one of those engines was the same one that SpaceX flew on its October flight.

Also flying for the first time was SpaceX's new generation second-stage Starship. This new generation comes with significant upgrades designed for "bringing major improvements to reliability and performance," the company wrote on its website.

For example, the flaps on this upgraded Starship are smaller and reoriented so they're not exposed to as much heat upon reentry. These flaps are designed to eventually help Starship fly back and touch down on land, making it reusable.

However, SpaceX has not yet recovered a Starship from spaceflight. So far, every Starship that has flown to space has sunk into the Indian Ocean. The ship on Thursday's flight was slated for the same fate before it was lost shortly after launch.

Starship was scheduled to deploy a set of 10 Starlink simulators, or dummies. They were about the same size and weight as SpaceX's next-generation V3 Starlink satellites. Deploying them was practice for eventually the real thing, which is a key part of SpaceX's business plan.

Starship is set to make other SpaceX rockets obsolete

In its final form, Starship should be able to release up to 100 second-generation Starlink satellites at a time, increasing SpaceX's internet coverage and a core pillar of its income.

Once Starship is operational, its sheer power will likely make it the cornerstone of SpaceX's business, which has long hinged on the comparatively wimpy Falcon 9 and its hefty counterpart, Falcon Heavy.

"Starship obsoletes Falcon 9 and the Dragon capsule," SpaceX COO Gwynne Shotwell said at the Baron Investment Conference in November, according to Ars Technica.

"We'll be flying that for six to eight more years," she added, "but ultimately, people are going to want to fly on Starship. It's bigger. It's more comfortable. It will be less expensive. And we will have flown it so many more times."