A rocket launched by billionaire Elon Musk’s SpaceX venture exploded Thursday evening, just minutes after taking off from its South Texas launch site, Reuters reports.
The company’s Starbase — located in the South Texas’ coastal Boca Chica area — lost contact with the test flight shortly after takeoff. While mission control attempted to regain contact, the Starship rocket started spinning uncontrollably in space with its engines cut off before exploding.
Social media videos showed rocket debris raining down on islands off the coast of Florida. The Federal Aviation Administration temporarily grounded flights at airports in Orlando, Miami, Fort Lauderdale and Palm Beach while the fiery remnants continued to fall.
This marks the second failure in a row this year for Musk’s rocket program. Thursday’s comes just a month after the company’s seventh test flight also ended in a fiery explosion. Meanwhile, Musk is shaking up the FAA, the government agency that oversees his rocket company.
One of SpaceX’s employees, Ted Malaska, last mont told the FAA to start work on a program to deploy thousands of the company’s Starlink satellite terminals or risk being fired, Bloomberg reports. Malaska is tasked with deploying thousands of the terminals at FAA locations nationwide after Musk reportedly took over an existing $2 billion contract from Verizon.
Lawmakers immediately raised concerns that the deal would pose a conflict of interest since the FAA also licenses SpaceX rocket launches and investigates the company’s mishaps. Starlink has since denied the reports of the deal with a tweet on X, which Musk also owns. “Starlink is a possible partial fix to an aging system. There is no effort or intent for Starlink to ‘take over’ any existing contract,” Wednesday’s tweet stated. The company also added that it’s providing the kits and service free of charge for an initial testing period to “identify instances where Starlink could serve as a longterm infrastructure upgrade for aviation safety.”
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This article appears in Mar 5-18, 2025.
