STARBASE, Texas — SpaceX's Starship rocket suffered another failure on Tuesday evening, marking the third straight loss of its next-generation Starship upper stage and dealing a fresh blow to the company's Mars colonization ambitions.

The 122-meter-tall Starship rocket system, the key vehicle for CEO Elon Musk's goal of sending humans to Mars, lifted off from SpaceX's Starbase, Texas, launch site. It flew beyond the point of two explosive attempts earlier this year that sent debris streaking over Caribbean islands and forced dozens of airliners to divert course.

For the latest launch, the ninth full test mission of Starship since the first attempt in April 2023, the upper-stage cruise vessel was lofted to space atop a previously flown booster — a first such demonstration of the booster's reusability.

However, SpaceX lost contact with the 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 spiraling came after SpaceX canceled a plan to deploy eight mock Starlink satellites into space — the rocket's "Pez" candy dispenser-like mechanism failed to work as designed.

"Not looking great with a lot of our on-orbit objectives for today," SpaceX broadcaster Dan Huot said on a company livestream.

Leak in fuel tank

In a post on X, Musk touted Starship's scheduled shutdown of an engine in space, a step previous test flights achieved last year. He said a leak in Starship's primary fuel tank led to its loss of control.

"Lot of good data to review," he said. "Launch cadence for next 3 flights will be faster, at approximately 1 every 3 to 4 weeks."

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

The recent setbacks indicate SpaceX is struggling to overcome a complicated chapter of Starship's multibillion-dollar development. But the company's engineering culture, widely considered more risk-tolerant than many of the aerospace industry's more established players, is built on a flight-testing strategy that pushes spacecraft to the point of failure, then fine-tunes improvements through frequent repetition.

Starship's planned trajectory for Tuesday included a nearly full orbit around Earth for a controlled splashdown in the Indian Ocean. This was to test new designs of its heat shield tiles and revised flaps for steering its blazing reentry and descent through Earth's atmosphere.

However, its early demise, appearing as a fireball streaking eastward through the night sky over southern Africa, puts another pause in Musk's speedy development goals for a rocket bound to play a central role in the US space program.

NASA plans to use the rocket to land humans on the moon in 2027, though that moon program faces turmoil amid Musk's Mars-focused influence over US President Donald Trump's administration.

Agencies via Xinhua