IFT-8: Another Booster Catch, Another Starship RUD

SpaceX succeeded in catching a Super Heavy booster this evening, but the Starship second stage was lost minutes later. It was the second Starship explosion in a row, again over the Caribbean.

The eighth Starship Integrated Flight Test (IFT-8) lifted off on time at 6:30 pm ET, three days after a first attempt was scrubbed.

Liftoff of Starship! pic.twitter.com/OL7moLdZ2u

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) March 6, 2025

Liftoff of the Super Heavy/Starship combination appeared flawless. The first stage, Super Heavy, or the “booster,” returned to the launch tower to be caught by mechanical arms — Mechazilla — or “chopsticks.”

Mechazilla has caught the Super Heavy booster! pic.twitter.com/JFeJSdnQ5x

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) March 6, 2025

SpaceX made a number of changes to Starship after it exploded over the Turks and Caicos Islands in January on IFT-7, but apparently they weren’t enough.

Starship again disintegrated over the Caribbean, what SpaceX calls a Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly or RUD.

During Starship’s ascent burn, the vehicle experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly and contact was lost. Our team immediately began coordination with safety officials to implement pre-planned contingency responses.

We will review the data from today’s flight test to better…

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) March 7, 2025

Photos of the RUD were quickly posted on X, the social media platform owned by SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk.

Just saw Starship 8 blow up in the Bahamas @SpaceX @elonmusk pic.twitter.com/rTMJu23oVx

— Jonathon Norcross (@NorcrossUSA) March 6, 2025

Is that space X rocket disintegration #spacex pic.twitter.com/apEagPIqDB

— Talha Mirza (@tmirza777) March 6, 2025

Footage of SpaceX’s Starship breaking up on reentry over the Bahamas and West Indies. pic.twitter.com/2TaGkvLzrB

— OSINTtechnical (@Osinttechnical) March 7, 2025

As with IFT-7, the FAA had to divert airplane traffic to avoid falling debris and reportedly stopped takeoffs at four Florida airports briefly.

Watch as air traffic clears the debris zones pic.twitter.com/1lQayfAbFz

— Scott Manley (@DJSnM) March 7, 2025

SpaceX later said an “energetic event in the aft portion of Starship resulted in the loss of several Raptor engines” which led to the loss of attitude control. Contact was lost about 9 minutes and 30 seconds after liftoff. The IFT-7 explosion also was due to an energetic event in the aft end of Starship — propellant leaks caused by “a harmonic response several times stronger in flight than had been seen during testing, which led to increased stress on hardware in the propulsion system.” Contact was lost 8 minutes and 20 seconds after liftoff in that case. They made a number of changes between IFT-7 and IFT-8 and Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder and CEO, posted on X that they’d learned a lot nonetheless.

It was an upper stage / ship failure tbh.

But we learned a good amount in building the new ship design and the flight.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 7, 2025

Starship is SpaceX’s future. Designed not only to launch satellites into Earth orbit, NASA has contracted with SpaceX to use it as a Human Landing System (HLS) for at least the first two Artemis missions to put astronauts back on the lunar surface and Musk wants to use it to send millions of people to Mars to create a multi-planetary species.

The FAA, which regulates commercial space launches and reentries, issued a statement that is it requiring SpaceX to perform a mishap investigation.

This article has been updated.