Liftoff is scheduled for 8:34 p.m. ET tonight (Jan. 29).

After the successful booster recovery, SpaceX officials reported losing contact with the spaceship toward the end of the ascend.

Starship experienced a "rapid unscheduled disassembly," which is a phrase SpaceX coined to describe an explosion.

SpaceX is targeting a 4½-hour launch window for another Starlink mission from 2:21 p.m. to 6:52 p.m., an FAA operations plan advisory shows.

The 171-foot-tall (52 meters) spacecraft exploded over the Atlantic Ocean near the Turks and Caicos islands around 8.5 minutes after launch, creating a spectacular sky show witnessed by many people in the area. And a fair few of these folks posted their photos and videos on X, the social media site owned by SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk.

SpaceX called the event a "rapid unscheduled disassembly," a tongue-in-cheek term denoting a rocket explosion, "during its ascent burn," in a statement posted to X-formerly-Twitter. "Teams will continue to review data from today's flight test to better ...

Starship, the most powerful rocket ever built, pulled off a daring booster catch on its most ambitious test flight yet, but the spacecraft was lost. Follow for the latest news.

The "rapid unscheduled disassembly" was likely caused by a propellant leak, Elon Musk said, and was captured on video by spectators on the ground.

SpaceX succeeded Thursday in once more catching the descending first-stage booster of its Starship megarocket in the "chopstick" arms of its launch tower, a stunning engineering feat it first accomplished in October.

The billionaire and his Silicon Valley associates landed in the capital and immediately moved to cut the size of the federal government, reprising the playbook he used after buying Twitter in 2022.