SpaceX says its Starship rocket broke up mid-flight as debris videos emerge online

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 CEO, shared a video of the debris on X, writing: “Success is uncertain, but entertainment is guaranteed!”

Nobody was aboard Starship, which is still being tested for future 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 launch site.

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 did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A SpaceX video posted earlier Thursday showed that the planned trajectory for Starship was to take it from the southern tip of Texas over the Gulf of Mexico and the Yucatan Peninsula, then east near Cuba and across the Atlantic Ocean. Had the flight gone as planned, it would ultimately have splashed down in the Indian Ocean.

This is a developing story please check back for updates.

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com