Elon Musk Reveals What Led To SpaceX Starship Crash Into Indian Ocean

Billionaire Elon Musk's commercial space flight company, SpaceX, suffered another setback on Sunday after its ninth Starship test flight exploded over the Indian Ocean just 30 minutes after the uncrewed rocket was launched into space from Texas. The ambitious project is central to Musk's dream of colonising Mars, who hoped to release a series of mock satellites following liftoff, but that got nixed because the door of the rocket failed to open all the way. 

In a series of posts on X (formerly Twitter), Musk acknowledged that both the mission's progress and the technical issues that led to the failure, but noted the test was a "big improvement" and has given them "lots of good data to review".

Starship made it to the scheduled ship engine cutoff, so big improvement over last flight! Also, no significant loss of heat shield tiles during ascent.

Leaks caused loss of main tank pressure during the coast and re-entry phase. Lot of good data to review.

Launch cadence for…

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 28, 2025

"Starship made it to the scheduled ship engine cutoff, so big improvement over last flight! Also, no significant loss of heat shield tiles during ascent. Leaks caused loss of main tank pressure during the coast and re-entry phase. Lot of good data to review," he wrote. 

Musk, however, vowed to pick up the pace. "Launch cadence for the next 3 flights will be faster - approximately one every 3 to 4 weeks,"  he said, congratulating the SpaceX team for "great achievement.

Great achievement by the @SpaceX team! https://t.co/s8m8cSNWUR

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 28, 2025

The billionaire CEO was scheduled to deliver an update on his space exploration ambitions in a speech from Starbase following the test flight, billed as a livestream presentation about "The Road to Making Life Multiplanetary." Hours later, he had yet to give the speech.

Musk's Mars Mission

The 400-foot tall (122 meter) Starship rocket system is the core of Musk's goal of sending humans to Mars. It is designed to eventually be fully reusable and launch at low cost, carrying the billionaire's hopes of making humanity a multi-planetary species.

The rocket lifted off from SpaceX's Starbase in Texas and flew beyond the point of two previous explosive attempts earlier this year. For the latest launch, the upper-stage cruise vessel was lofted to space atop a previously flown booster - a first such demonstration of the booster's reusability. 

But SpaceX lost contact with the 232-foot lower-stage booster during its descent before it plunged into the sea, rather than making the controlled splashdown the company had planned. Starship, meanwhile, continued into suborbital space but began to spin uncontrollably roughly 30 minutes into the mission. The errant spiralling came after SpaceX cancelled a plan to deploy eight mock Starlink satellites into space - the rocket's "Pez" candy dispenser-like mechanism failed to work as designed.

Meanwhile, SpaceX has said the Starship models that have flown this year bear significant design upgrades from previous prototypes, as thousands of company employees work to build a multi-purpose rocket capable of putting massive batches of satellites in space, carrying humans back to the moon, and ultimately ferrying astronauts to Mars.