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.

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”.