SpaceX Catches Starship Booster Again but Stumbles With Upper Stage Glitch

It was a one-step-forward, one-step-back kind of day for SpaceX. The Mechazilla tower once again caught the incoming Starship booster in dramatic fashion, but the upper stage was lost due to an anomaly during ascent.

Starship lifted off from the Boca Chica launch mount at 5:37 p.m. ET, soaring into a clear blue Texas sky. The 403-foot-tall (123-meter) rocket initiated hot staging and booster engine cutoff shortly before the three-minute mark. The booster then began its descent back to Earth, while the upper stage continued its journey into space.

Flight controllers quickly gave the go-ahead for a booster catch, with the Super Heavy returning to the launch mount roughly seven minutes into the mission. The “Mechazilla” launch tower, equipped with its chopstick-like arms, successfully caught the incoming booster. This marks the second time that SpaceX has caught the booster (it did so for the first time on October 13, 2024 during Starship’s fifth test flight), further validating the catch tower concept and providing a major vote of confidence that Starship will eventually become a fully reusable launch system.

Mechazilla has caught the Super Heavy booster! pic.twitter.com/aq91TloYzY

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) January 16, 2025

While the booster succeeded in its mission, the same couldn’t be said for the upper stage. An unspecified anomaly resulted in the loss of the vehicle during ascent, preventing SpaceX from achieving several key objectives for the mission, including the deployment of mock Starlink satellites. Starship failed prior to the 12-minute mark, with its final telemetry showing a speed of 13,246 miles per hour (21,317 kilometers per hour) and an altitude of 91 miles (146 kilometers).

The upper stage used for this mission—the seventh Starship flight test—featured an upgraded design. It’s the first upper stage failure since the program’s early days of fully integrated Starship tests. The upper stage, with its design tweaks, meant SpaceX was essentially dealing with a new kind of vehicle, with systems interacting with each other for the first time. According to the SpaceX broadcast, “a couple of engines dropped out” before communications were lost with the vehicle, which appears to have exploded.

SpaceX will likely disclose a reason for the failure in the coming days or weeks, but needless to say, the company will learn from this setback. It’s what SpaceX does—treating failures as incremental stepping stones toward eventual success.

“Starship experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly during its ascent burn. Teams will continue to review data from today’s flight test to better understand root cause,” the company explained in a tweet. “With a test like this, success comes from what we learn, and today’s flight will help us improve Starship’s reliability.”

Unconfirmed photos showed the upper stage falling back to Earth in pieces, leaving bright, colorful streaks in its wake.

RUD of the century tbh. pic.twitter.com/XCbFxtO2wE

— A. Pettit (@PettitFrontier) January 16, 2025

SpaceX is steadily making progress toward turning Starship into a fully operational launch system, inching closer with each test flight. Once operational, the rocket is expected to revolutionize space access, launching large batches of Starlink satellites alongside payloads for paying customers. Its gigantic payload fairing and lifting power could even enable the design and deployment of spacecraft that were previously unlaunchable due to size and weight constraints; powered by 33 Raptor engines, Starship should be capable of delivering 150 metric tons to low Earth orbit.

NASA, which has invested in Starship as part of its Artemis program, plans to use the rocket’s upper stage as a human landing system for future Moon missions. And, of course, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has far grander ambitions—he sees Starship as the key to colonizing Mars and transforming humanity into a multi-planetary species.