Space X's starship has "met its demise" after what seemed like a successful test launch.

Tuesday’s launch marked the ninth test flight of Elon Musk’s prototype spacecraft, which he hopes will one day ferry humans to the Moon and to Mars.

The test began well, with the enormous rocket blasting off successfully from its Texas launch site and avoiding the fiery failures that ended its last two flights in explosions.

Shortly after launch, the booster section meant to perform a controlled splashdown lost contact with engineers and tumbled into the ocean. At the same time, the Starship itself continued into space but began spinning out of control.

The first two launches ended in fiery failures

Crucially, it also failed to deploy a set of eight mock satellites, a key part of testing its payload delivery system.

A SpaceX staffer, commenting during the live stream, admitted the situation was “not looking great” but insisted the company had still achieved many of its objectives.

Elon Musk, meanwhile, struck an upbeat tone. Posting on X, he said the mission produced a “lot of good data to review”.

Starship is central to Musk’s ambition of building a fully reusable launch system. He hopes it will eventually replace SpaceX’s reliable Falcon 9 rockets, which currently dominate the commercial satellite launch market.

While critics might see the string of test failures as cause for concern, SpaceX says this is all part of the plan.

The company follows an aggressive development strategy: push the hardware to its limits, watch it fail, and then improve it.

“We’ve done this in computer modelling. It shows that sometimes the control isn’t great, but only one way to really prove it out and that’s to get real-world data,” Dan Hout from SpaceX explained during the descent.

He said that SpaceX lost contact with Super Heavy shortly before touchdown and confirmed it had met its “demise”.

“As if the flight test was not exciting enough, Starship experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly,” the company said in a post on X.

The launch seemed successful at first

“Teams will continue to review data and work toward our next flight test.

“With a test like this, success comes from what we learn, and today’s test will help us improve Starship’s reliability as SpaceX seeks to make life multiplanetary.”

Mission controllers believe Super Heavy exploded above the Gulf of Mexico.