Starship Flight 9 leapt off the Texas gulf flats in a plume of white-hot exhaust, showcasing the first recycled Super Heavy booster to leave the pad. For 30 breath-holding minutes everything looked brighter than prior attempts—until the payload-door jammed, fuel leaked, and the 123-metre stack began an ungainly pirouette en route to a fiery breakup over the Indian Ocean. SpaceX later confirmed the spacecraft’s “rapid unscheduled disassembly,” while the booster, pushed past recovery limits, shattered in the Gulf of Mexico.

Even so, Elon Musk framed the outing as progress: the rocket cleared the Caribbean, hit a higher velocity, and ticked off key data points for future lunar hardware. Engineers had hoped to test heat-shield tiles during a controlled re-entry, yet the uncontrolled tumble still fed reams of telemetry into Starbase’s ever-hungry computers. The flight also demonstrated a refurbished, 29-engine Super Heavy can survive the rigors of launch, a cornerstone if Starship is to fly every few weeks and become NASA’s lunar lander of choice.

The clock now resets. Musk promises a tighter cadence—one Starship every three to four weeks for the next trio of tests—while technicians swap tiles, tweak plumbing, and chase the elusive perfect orbit. NASA, banking on a Block 3 variant to ferry Artemis astronauts, needs those promise-turned-performances sooner than later. Tuesday’s tumble may have scorched the vision boards, but it also nudged the world’s biggest rocket a step closer to the Moon-and-Mars doubleheader SpaceX keeps betting on.