• SpaceX launched its Starship mega-rocket for the seventh time on Thursday.
• It performed an epic booster catch for the second time, but the Starship exploded shortly after.
• The launch marked the first flight of a new-generation Starship.

SpaceX's Starship mega-rocket has stumbled on the road to commercial use. On Thursday, it unexpectedly dropped out of communications and exploded as it screamed toward space for its seventh flight.

Shortly after Starship's explosion, Elon Musk, the founder and CEO of SpaceX, wrote on X, "Improved versions of the ship & booster already waiting for launch."

The mishap happened on the same day the SpaceX rival Blue Origin, owned by Jeff Bezos, successfully launched its New Glenn rocket into orbit. Blue Origin lost New Glenn's booster during Thursday morning's test flight.

What happened to the Starship

After liftoff, the rocket's Super Heavy booster heaved the Starship spaceship toward space, separated itself, and fell back toward Earth. As the falling booster approached SpaceX's Texas facilities, it nailed a complex maneuver that had happened only once before.

The booster fired its engines to lower itself to a catch tower, where a pair of giant "chopstick" arms closed around its trunk and caught it.

This technological feat is key to reaching SpaceX's goal of building a fleet of rapidly, fully reusable rockets to help slash spaceflight costs, advance the company's business model, and ultimately build a city of people on Mars.

"Kudos to you and the whole SpaceX team on the flawless booster catch! Very impressive," Bezos wrote to Musk on X about the achievement.

Shortly after the booster catch, SpaceX said the upper stage of the system, Starship itself, was lost. The company later confirmed on X that it had suffered a rapid unscheduled disassembly, which is another way of saying it exploded.

"We were just coming up to the end of that ascent burn for the ship when we started to lose a couple of the engines," Dan Huot, one of the hosts of SpaceX's livestream of the launch, said in the broadcast.

Then the ship dropped out of communications, meaning there was some kind of anomaly, and Starship was lost, Huot said.

"This was a brand-new vehicle essentially," he added. "With that, there's a lot of things you're upgrading, but there's a lot of things you're going to learn as all those systems are now interacting with each other for the first time."

In an X post on Thursday night, Musk wrote that preliminary indicators suggested Starship "had an oxygen/fuel leak in the cavity above the ship engine firewall that was large enough to build pressure in excess of the vent capacity."

"Apart from obviously double-checking for leaks, we will add fire suppression to that volume and probably increase vent area. Nothing so far suggests pushing next launch past next month," Musk added.

Dean Olson, who captured footage of the Starship debris while he was in Turks and Caicos, told Business Insider he heard the sound of constant "thunder" for about a minute after witnessing the explosion.

"I'm just walking out of the restaurant holding a cocktail, and I just looked up," Olson said. "Everyone's breath is kind of just taken away."

"Nobody knew what was going on," he added. "There was a lot of people panicking, to be honest with you."

SpaceX didn't respond to a request for comment.

SpaceX's 7th Starship flight didn't achieve all it set out to

For the first time, SpaceX flew Starship with a reused Raptor rocket engine.

The Super Heavy booster runs on 33 Raptor engines. For the entire rocket to be reusable, as Musk has said he intends it to be, those engines must be recycled and reused, too.

Aboard Thursday's flight, one of those engines was the same one that SpaceX flew on its October flight.

Also flying for the first time was SpaceX's new-generation second-stage Starship. This new generation comes with significant upgrades designed for "bringing major improvements to reliability and performance," the company wrote on its website.

For example, the flaps on this upgraded Starship are smaller and reoriented, so they're not exposed to as much heat upon reentry. These flaps are designed to eventually help Starship fly back and touch down on land, making it reusable.

But SpaceX has not yet recovered a Starship from spaceflight. So far, every Starship that has flown to space has sunk into the Indian Ocean. The ship on Thursday's flight was expected to have the same fate before it was lost shortly after launch.

Starship was scheduled to deploy a set of 10 Starlink simulators, or dummies. They were about the same size and weight as SpaceX's next-generation V3 Starlink satellites. Deploying them was practice for eventually the real thing, which is a key part of SpaceX's business plan.

Starship is set to make other SpaceX rockets obsolete

In its final form, Starship should be able to release up to 100 second-generation Starlink satellites at a time, increasing SpaceX's internet coverage and a core pillar of its income.

Once Starship is operational, its sheer power will probably make it the cornerstone of SpaceX's business, which has long hinged on the comparatively wimpy Falcon 9 and its hefty counterpart, Falcon Heavy.

"Starship obsoletes Falcon 9 and the Dragon capsule," SpaceX's chief operating officer, Gwynne Shotwell, said at the Baron Investment Conference in November, according to Ars Technica.

"We'll be flying that for six to eight more years," she added, "but ultimately, people are going to want to fly on Starship. It's bigger. It's more comfortable. It will be less expensive. And we will have flown it so many more times."

• NASA scrapped its $11 billion plan to return samples from Mars to Earth by 2040.
• It now has not one but two new options to choose from — both are faster and cheaper.
• The samples could return as soon as 2035 and may contain the first-ever signs of ancient alien life.

The Perseverance rover is building up a stash of rocks on Mars that could contain the first-ever signs of alien life, but NASA is scrambling to figure out how it will bring them back to Earth for analysis.

NASA had a plan but it got "out of control," in the words of the agency's administrator, Bill Nelson. After a series of delays, the cost ballooned to $11 billion and the samples wouldn't be landing on Earth until 2040.

So Nelson scrapped that plan in April and called for new proposals from outside and within NASA.

After months of assessment, on Tuesday, Nelson announced that "the wizards at NASA" had come up with a new plan, which could bring the Mars rocks to Earth as early as 2035 for as cheap as $5.8 billion.

"We want to have the quickest, cheapest way to get these 30 samples back," Nelson said during a NASA presser on Tuesday.

For that to work, he said the incoming Trump administration will need to get on board.

"This is going to be a function of the new administration in order to fund this," Nelson said. "And it's an appropriation that has to start right now, fiscal year '25."

The search for alien life on Mars

NASA is not looking for active alien life but rather fossilized hints of long-gone microbial life.

The $2.4 billion Perseverance rover has spent the last four years exploring Jezero Crater, which was a lake billions of years ago. If microbes ever lived on Mars, this is the ideal spot to search for evidence of them.

In fact, in July, Perseverance stumbled on a rock in Jezero Crater that contained some of the strongest potential evidence of ancient alien life to date.

One of the rock's outstanding features was tiny white "leopard spots" that could suggest the presence of chemical reactions similar to those associated with microbial life on Earth.

It's still uncertain whether this is truly a sign of alien microbes. There could be non-biological explanations for the spots. To check, NASA needs to get that rock here to Earth for study in laboratories.

NASA's new plan

Bringing Perseverance's Mars samples to Earth will be complicated.

NASA must launch a mission that collects the samples from the Martian surface and launches them into Mars' orbit, where they must meet up with a European spacecraft designed to grab them and carry them back to Earth.

To make things simpler and reduce costs, NASA focused on how it would drop that mission to the Martian surface.

In order to maximize the chance of the sample return mission moving forward, NASA chose not one but two options to pursue.

The first option would involve using existing technology that's previously landed on Mars. That's a sky crane, similar to the ones that helped lower NASA's Curiosity and Perseverance rovers on Mars' surface.

The second option involves working with existing commercial partners, like SpaceX and Blue Origin. In that scenario, NASA would use new commercial technology, untested on Mars, like a heavy lander, Nelson said.

Both paths would cost around $6 or $7 billion and deliver the samples to Earth before 2040, NASA determined.

Nelson said he expects NASA to choose one of those paths forward in 2026 since the engineering work required to fully understand each option will take about a year.

He added that NASA will need $300 million to do that work in fiscal year 2025. Trump would have to include that expense in his budget proposal, and Congress would have to approve it.

"And if they want to get this thing back on a direct return earlier, they're going to have to put more money into it, even more than $300 million in fiscal year 25. And that would be the case every year going forward," Nelson said.

As part of the transition to the new Trump administration, Nelson will likely be handing the agency over to Trump-nominee Jared Isaacman, a billionaire and two-time SpaceX astronaut.

After Trump nominated him for NASA Administrator, Isaacman wrote in a post on X that "Americans will walk on the Moon and Mars."

His position on the Mars Sample Return mission is unclear. Nelson said he had not spoken with Isaacman about it.

• A 65-year-old patient has died of bird flu, Louisiana officials reported on Monday.
• The patient had underlying conditions and was likely infected by exposure to birds.
• This is the first death linked to the current outbreak of H5N1, avian influenza.

Bird flu has claimed its first human death in the US.

A Louisiana patient died from a severe case of the H5N1 avian influenza, state health officials reported on Monday.

The patient, who was over 65 and had underlying conditions, is the only human case of H5N1 in Louisiana.

There is still no sign that the H5N1 virus can spread between people. The Louisiana patient contracted the virus after exposure to wild birds and a non-commercial backyard flock, officials reported.

The bird flu's proliferation through bird and animal populations worldwide has led to many human spillover cases over the years. There have been 939 cases of human H5N1 infections worldwide as of November 2024, according to the World Health Organization. Of those, 464 were fatal.

"I think it's pretty clear that we will continue to see severe disease," Richard Webby, a virologist at St. Jude and director of the WHO animal and bird flu center, told Business Insider. "I guess the real question is are we going to see more? I don't know the answer to that one."

A new variant of H5N1 with concerning mutations

The Louisiana patient, who was hospitalized in late 2024, carried a new version of bird flu, which is unlike the bird flu that has been spreading in cattle across the US, the CDC reported. A teenager in Canada, who was hospitalized with severe bird flu in November, also carried that new version, which is called the D1.1 genotype.

Public-health experts are concerned that H5N1 could develop mutations that allow it to adapt better to infecting mammals. That could set the virus on a path to human-to-human transmission.

Webby said samples of the D1.1 genotype virus "did look like they were starting to develop some of those mutations" after infecting the Louisiana and Canada patients.

Fortunately, the mutated virus did not appear to pass from those two patients to other people.

"To be honest, the last month, six weeks, have made me a little more uneasy about the situation," Webby said.

The Louisiana Department of Health said in its report that the public health risk for the general public remains low, but "people who work with birds, poultry or cows, or have recreational exposure to them, are at higher risk."

Still, Webby said the Louisiana case shows that "the risk of catching this virus is not just for those that are in a milking parlor in California," who are some of the most at-risk due to the widespread outbreak in the state's cattle.

Rather, he said, "anywhere where there's birds, there is a risk to individuals who are in contact with those birds."