SpaceX says its Starship spacecraft broke up

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SpaceX said Thursday that its Starship space vehicle broke up during a flight meant to test the megarocket's capabilities.

The rocket system's upper stage appears to have disintegrated somewhere over the Gulf of Mexico or possibly the Caribbean Sea. Shortly after SpaceX said it lost touch with the spacecraft, videos emerged on social media showing debris streaming across the sky.

Elon Musk, SpaceX's founder and CEO, shared a video of the debris on X, writing: "Success is uncertain, but entertainment is guaranteed!"

Musk later added: "Preliminary indication is that we had an oxygen/fuel leak in the cavity above the ship engine firewall that was large enough to build pressure in excess of the vent capacity."

Musk added that the company would makes some changes including more fire supression but that the company is not making any changes to plans for upcoming launches.

Nobody was aboard Starship, which is still being tested for missions to the moon and beyond.

SpaceX's seventh test flight of Starship started smoothly, with the rocket lifting off and its booster returning to land intact at the company's "Starbase" launch site near Brownsville, Texas.

Problems began shortly thereafter, when SpaceX lost touch with Starship roughly nine minutes after liftoff. Kate Tice, SpaceX's senior manager of quality systems engineering, said the company had lost the ship, and SpaceX wrote on X that it had experienced a "rapid unscheduled disassembly."

The Federal Aviation Administration said Thursday that it is "aware an anomaly occurred during the SpaceX Starship Flight 7 mission."

Shortly afterward, the FAA said in an updated statement that it "briefly slowed and diverted aircraft around the area where space vehicle debris was falling," adding that normal operations have resumed.