May 27, 2025, 7:49 p.m. ET SpaceX’s massive Starship blasted off into the sky on Tuesday night for its ninth test flight following back-to-back failures earlier this year – but the mission faltered in orbit and the ship burned up as it plunged back toward Earth’s atmosphere. The 400-foot-tall ship launched from the company’s Starbase facility in Texas just after 7:30 p.m., with the rocket aiming to deploy Starlink satellite simulators, a first for Starship, before a scheduled landing in the Indian Ocean. But the doomed spacecraft, which took off after a brief delay to resolve technical issues, soon encountered problems in space when Starship couldn’t deploy eight dummy satellites after the payload door failed to open. The 400-foot-tall ship launched from the company’s Starbase facility in Texas, with the rocket aiming to deploy eight Starlink satellite simulators. SpaceX “Obviously this is a test we want to be able to do before we’re deploying full-on Starlinks,” SpaceX’s Dan Huot said during a live broadcast. “But the real focus for this, now that we are in space, is getting to that reentry that is the most critical phase of Starship that we still have to prove out.” Huot later announced that SpaceX lost control of the spacecraft as the ship tumbled uncontrollably into the earth’s thick atmosphere during re-entry. It’s unclear where the ship landed or if its still in one piece. SpaceX lost control of the spacecraft as the ship tumbled uncontrollably into the earth’s thick atmosphere during re-entry. SpaceX “We are trying to do something that is impossibly hard, and it’s not always going to reach it in a straight line,” Huot said at the end of the live broadcast. “We said there’s going to be bumps. There’s going to be turns. But seeing that ship in space today was a hell of a moment for us.”