SpaceX’s bold march toward interplanetary exploration encountered another obstacle during its ninth integrated flight test of the Starship-Super Heavy system. Despite notable improvements from prior attempts, Flight 9 ended prematurely after the vehicle lost attitude control roughly 20 minutes into its journey, culminating in another so-called “Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly” (RUD) during reentry.
Credit: SpaceX via X
Launched at 7:36 p.m. ET from Starbase, Texas, Starship Flight 9 marked a significant evolution in SpaceX's testing campaign. It was the third flight to utilize the Block 2 version of the Starship upper stage and the first to feature a previously flown Super Heavy booster — a major step forward in SpaceX’s goal to develop fully reusable launch vehicles.
During the flight, the Super Heavy booster, tail number B14, successfully lifted the Starship upper stage, designated S35, off the pad with all 33 Raptor engines firing in unison. The vehicle cleanly performed a hot-stage separation — a critical maneuver in which the upper stage ignites while still attached to the first stage — and the booster completed a boostback burn. However, the mission faltered when the booster failed to complete its landing burn and disintegrated mid-air over the Gulf of Mexico during an attempted soft splashdown.
Starship S35 initially continued on its course and surpassed the points at which its predecessors, S33 and S34, failed during earlier flights. However, signs of trouble emerged around 30 minutes into the mission. Onboard video, which had been absent for nearly 10 minutes during the upper stage coast, returned to show the spacecraft spinning — a telltale sign of attitude control failure.
According to SpaceX commentator Dan Huot, the vehicle experienced a leak that caused a loss in main tank pressure, resulting in its inability to control orientation. This failure made it impossible to perform the planned in-space relight of a single Raptor engine — a key test designed to validate Starship’s ability to deorbit or conduct secondary maneuvers in space.
The loss of control also thwarted another important test: the deployment of a payload door that was meant to release eight dummy panels simulating the mass and volume of Version 3 Starlink satellites. The door never opened.
Despite these setbacks, SpaceX’s founder and CEO Elon Musk struck an optimistic tone. “Starship made it to the scheduled ship engine cutoff, so big improvement over last flight! Also, no significant loss of heat shield tiles during ascent,” he wrote on X (formerly Twitter). “Leaks caused loss of main tank pressure during the coast and re-entry phase. Lot of good data to review.”
Musk also emphasized that future flights are on the horizon, stating the company plans to increase launch cadence to approximately one flight every three to four weeks. This comes on the heels of a recent FAA decision approving SpaceX’s request to increase its annual launch and landing capacity at Starbase to 25 operations.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which oversees the safety of commercial space launches, confirmed that it is “aware an anomaly occurred during the SpaceX Starship Flight 9 mission” and that it is actively working with the company to assess the event. “There are no reports of public injury or damage to public property at this time,” the agency added.
In the lead-up to Flight 9, Musk had teased a live-streamed talk titled “The Road to Making Life Multiplanetary,” originally scheduled before launch, then postponed. The event now appears to be shelved, though Musk did give select interviews, including with Ars Technica’s Eric Berger. In that conversation, Musk revealed that SpaceX believed it had solved “80 percent” of the issues tied to earlier failures, attributing some past problems to the need for better fastening between the Raptor engine thrust chambers and injector heads.
He also previewed the impending arrival of Version 3 of both Starship and its Raptor engines, describing the redesign as “radical” and transformative.
Flight 9’s failure to complete its mission comes in the wake of IFT-7 and IFT-8, which both ended in fiery explosions over the Caribbean earlier this year. While Flight 9 managed to surpass those benchmarks — flying past the Caribbean and reaching an altitude of approximately 59 kilometers before breaking apart over the Indian Ocean — it still did not achieve a complete end-to-end success.
In a show of support, Jared Isaacman — a private astronaut and nominee to become the next NASA administrator — lauded the progress. “Pretty incredible to get this kind of footage from the extreme environment of reentry,” he said on X. “Some may focus on the lows, but behind the efforts of Starship—and other programs like New Glenn, Neutron, Vulcan, Terran, Stoke, etc.—is a massive space economy taking shape.”
Isaacman highlighted the broader implications of these efforts, noting that tens of thousands of jobs and billions in private investment are being poured into commercial spaceflight, all aimed at “truly opening the last great frontier.”
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Keep rolling the dice it gets better every time. Remember Rome was not built in a day.