SpaceX successfully launched Starship Flight 8, caught booster but lost ship altitude control

On Thursday, March 6, 2025, SpaceX launched Starship Flight 8 rocket to space and successfully lifted off from the Starbase Texas. This was the second launch attempt for this test mission and the initial one was scrubbed on Monday, March 3.

The Starship is an integrated launch vehicle with two stages – a Super Heavy booster with 33 Raptor engines and the ship with 6 Raptor engines. These stages operate separately in their own phases and are fully reusable.

These two stages are designed to launch, complete their tasks, and return to the launch stage.

After reaching Max Q, the flight performed a hot-staging and the booster returned to its landing trajectory with a Go for tower catch from the flight director. Meanwhile, the ship fired its Raptor engines and entered the suborbital plane to continue its in-space objectives.

At the time of reentry, the booster moved at an unprecedented speed toward the launch site and fired its 13 Raptor engines to slow down and switched to only 3 Rator to navigate inside the chopsticks for the third ever booster catch.

Liftoff of Starship! pic.twitter.com/OL7moLdZ2u

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) March 6, 2025

Second stage

The company is using an upgraded ship for this flight with increased height of up to 52 meters and improved forward flaps near the nose cone. The company has redesigned the propulsion system with a 25 percent increase in propellant volume over the previous generation ship. This upgrade improves the vehicle’s performance and helps it to fly for a longer duration in space.

The ship also has new avionics with additional redundancy for objectives such as ship-to-ship propellant transfer and ship return to the launch site.

However, within a few minutes after booster landing, the ship performed a sub-orbit burn and lost its control due to an engine failure. SpaceX will share more information about the ship later.