SpaceX launched its Starship megarocket for the ninth time on May 27, 2025. The two stages of the Starship separated as planned, and the upper stage reached space. This was an improvement over the vehicle’s most recent two flights.
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However, both stages were lost before they could accomplish their full flight goals.
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Starship made it to the scheduled ship engine cutoff, so big improvement over last flight!” SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said after the flight. “Leaks caused loss of main tank pressure during the coast and re-entry phase. A lot of good data to review.”
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Musk added that the next three Starship test launches could lift off every three to four weeks in the coming days. SpaceX is developing Starship to help humanity settle beyond Earth and perform other tasks. The vehicle’s two stages are a giant booster called Super Heavy and a 171-foot-tall upper-stage spacecraft known as Starship.
Both are designed to be fully reusable and are powered by SpaceX’s Raptor engines. Before this flight, Starship had lifted off eight times from SpaceX’s site in South Texas. Two of those flights occurred this year but had mixed outcomes.
Starship’s continued trial and error
We are trying to do something that is impossibly hard,” said Dan Huot from SpaceX’s communications team. The mission lifted off from Starbase at 7:37 p.m. EDT, sending the 40-story-tall rocket into the sky.
It marked the first-ever reuse of a Super Heavy booster, which had previously flown during Flight 7 in January and required minimal refurbishment for this flight. Despite its promising start, things went awry. The Super Heavy booster performed a controlled return but broke apart about 6 minutes and 20 seconds into the flight.
“Confirmation that the booster did demise,” Huot said during the webcast. On the upper stage side, Starship reached space on a suborbital trajectory over the Atlantic Ocean. However, complications arose when the vehicle couldn’t fully open its payload door to deploy dummy satellites.
About 30 minutes after launch, Starship started tumbling due to a leak in its fuel-tank systems, leading SpaceX to abandon plans for further tests and to anticipate its breakup over the Indian Ocean during reentry. While SpaceX did not get all the data it wanted from Flight 9, the company plans to continue iterating on its designs and testing them rigorously. This is exactly the SpaceX way,” said Jessie Anderson, SpaceX manufacturing engineering manager, during the webcast.
“We’re going to learn, iterate, and iterate over and over again until we figure it out.”
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