SpaceX’s Starship rocket lifts off for first test flight, but explodes in mid-air

South Padre Island, Texas (CNN) SpaceX’s Starship, the most powerful rocket ever built, took off from a launch pad in South Texas at 9:33 a.m. ET Thursday, but exploded in midair before stage separation.

Thursday’s launch marked the vehicle’s historic first test flight. “As if the flight test wasn’t exciting enough, Starship experienced a quick unplanned disassembly before stage separation,” SpaceX tweeted.

The massive Super Heavy rocket booster, housing 33 engines, took off and sent a massive boom across the coastal landscape as it shot to life. The Starship spacecraft, riding atop the booster, soared out over the Gulf of Mexico.

About 2½ minutes after liftoff, the Super Heavy rocket booster was scheduled to use up most of its fuel and separate from the Starship spacecraft, allowing the booster to be ejected into the ocean. The starship was supposed to use its own engines, burning for more than six minutes, to propel itself to near-orbital speeds.

The flight reached its highest point 24.2 miles (39 kilometers) above the ground, and the explosion occurred about four minutes after liftoff, according to SpaceX.

“The vehicle experienced multiple engines during the flight test, lost altitude and began falling,” according to an update from SpaceX. “The flight termination system was commandeered on both the booster and the ship.”

SpaceX said that “teams will continue to assess data and work toward our next flight test.” The road and beach near the launch pad are expected to remain closed until Friday.

“An irregularity occurred during takeoff and prior to separation that resulted in the loss of the vehicle. No injuries or damage to public property have been reported,” according to a statement Thursday afternoon from the Federal Aviation Administration.

“The FAA will oversee the accident investigation of the Starship/Super Heavy test mission. A return to flight of the Starship/Super Heavy vehicle is based on the FAA determining that any system, process or procedure related to the accident does not affect public safety. This is standard practice for all accident investigations.”

Defines success for Starship

Although it ended in an explosion, Thursday’s test met several of the company’s goals for the vehicle.

Clearing the launch pad was a major milestone for Starship. Ahead of the launch, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk sought to temper expectations, saying: “Success is not what should be expected… It would be insane.”

“With a test like this, success comes from what we learn, and today’s test will help us improve Starship reliability as SpaceX seeks to make life multiplanetary,” SpaceX tweeted after the blast.

Musk congratulated team members on “an exciting test launch” in a tweet after launch and said they “learned a lot for the next test launch in a few months.”

In a follow-up email to his staff, Musk added: “I don’t want to jinx it, but I think it’s highly likely that we will reach orbit this year and recover the booster and the ship, if not this year, then certainly next year . March, here we come!”

SpaceX will need a new launch license from the FAA to make another attempt, but the company does not expect the process to be as labor-intensive as securing the license for Thursday’s launch.

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson chimed in Twitter to share their congratulations on the flight test.

“Every great achievement throughout history has required a certain level of calculated risk, because with great risk comes great reward. Looking forward to everything SpaceX learns, to the next flight test – and beyond.”

The test flight comes after years of explosive tests, regulatory hurdles and public hype from Musk.

The company has been known to embrace fiery mishaps during the rocket development process. SpaceX claims such accidents are the fastest and most efficient way to gather data, an approach that sets the company apart from its close partner NASA, which prefers slow, methodical testing to dramatic flares.

Musk has talked about Starship — making elaborate presentations about its design and purpose — for years, and he often talks about its potential to carry cargo and people to Mars, even though NASA also plans to use the vehicle to put its astronauts on the moon. He has even said that his sole purpose in founding SpaceX was to develop a vehicle like the Starship that could establish a human settlement on the Red Planet.

Crowds of spectators lined the local beaches to catch a glimpse of Starship’s launch, bringing folding chairs, children and dogs in tow. That echoed Monday’s turnout for the company’s first launch attempt, which was ultimately grounded as engineers worked to troubleshoot a problem with a valve on the Super Heavy booster.

In the area around Starbase – SpaceX’s name for the Starship development site at Texas’ southernmost tip – many locals have greeted the rocket with enthusiasm. Signs of the Starship permeate the area: a model Starship in a front yard, a “Rocket Ranch” campground filled with die-hard enthusiasts, and a billboard advertising Martian beer.

What’s next for Starship?

The test flight is a small step in an extensive project. Before the Starship can complete its first mission or host astronauts, SpaceX has significant technological questions to hash out.

NASA has tapped SpaceX to offer a Starship lunar lander that can carry astronauts from a separate spacecraft down to the lunar surface for the Artemis III mission, which is planned as early as 2025. Before that mission can take off, however, SpaceX must prove that Starship can get to the moon – much less Mars, which is Musk’s ultimate ambition.

The sheer mass of the vehicle will force the company to refuel the spacecraft while it is still in Earth’s orbit. More than a dozen launches — carrying nothing but propellant — could be needed to give a single Starship lunar lander enough fuel to cross the 238,900 miles (384,500 kilometers) of space between Earth and the moon.

Before SpaceX can even hash out that process, it also has to put the Starship into orbit in the first place. Thursday’s test flight only attempted to reach near-orbital speeds and make a partial lap of the planet — a feat that will have to wait for a future test.

Even after flight tests begin to prove the vehicle’s design, the Starship spacecraft must be equipped with all the necessary life support equipment astronauts need for a journey into deep space.

NASA was not involved in planning the flight profile for this test flight or guiding SpaceX on what to do, according to Lisa Hammond, NASA’s associate program manager for the Human Landing System at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

In an interview earlier this month, Hammond did not share a specific checklist of tests or flights NASA hopes to see before Starship is entrusted with a lunar landing mission.

“I don’t want to put a number on it,” she said, adding that the Artemis II mission, scheduled for next year, will see humans fly atop the SLS rocket after just one unmanned test flight.

“The confidence comes in the design, the confidence comes in the safety of the vehicle for the crew,” Hammond said.

In addition to the Artemis III mission, Starship already has some ambitious projects on the manifest. SpaceX has sold a tourism tour around the moon by starship to Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa. The mission, called “Dear Moon,” plans to fly Maezawa and eight crewmates, including various artists from around the world.

Most of the “Dear Moon” crew was on the ground to witness the Starship’s first test flight.

Karim Iliya, a photographer currently based in Iceland, described the experience of watching the flight attempt from a few miles away gone.

“This wave of sound just hit my body and I could feel it and I could hear it and I was like, ‘Am I really going into that machine? It was absolutely wild,'” Iliya told CNN. “There was just this sense of joy and energy that flowed through the crowd and through the people.”

Iliya added that the rocket explosion did not give him any extra nerves for his future space travel. He understood that he was seeing a prototype plane.

But he experienced a “sense of intensity” by visiting the rocket shortly after Monday’s botched launch attempt.

He said the Dear Moon crew was invited to get a closer look at the rocket then. The car was still ventilating.

“We heard this very loud sound. Many of us – I think – we are ready to climb,” Iliya so. “That’s when I realized how alive this machine is and how intense it is and will be when we actually buckle down and leave the planet – which in itself is an absurd thought.”

What you should know about this rocket

Starship development has been based at SpaceX’s privately owned spaceport about 40 minutes outside Brownsville, Texas, on the US-Mexico border.

Testing began many years ago with short “jump tests” of early spacecraft prototypes. The company started with short flights that lifted a few dozen feet off the ground before progressing to high-altitude flights, most of which resulted in dramatic explosions when the company attempted to land the prototypes upright.

However, a suborbital flight test in May 2021 ended successfully.

Since then, SpaceX has also been working on getting its Super Heavy booster ready for flight. The giant, 230-foot-tall (69-meter-tall) cylinder is packed with 33 of the company’s Raptor engines.

Fully stacked, the Starship and Super Heavy are approximately 400 feet (120 meters) tall.

CNN’s Jackie Wattles reported from South Padre Island, Texas, while Ashley Strickland reported from Atlanta.