STORY: A SpaceX Starship rocket broke apart in space minutes after launching from Texas on Thursday.

Its breakup was seen over the skies of the Carribean.

Clips online showed fiery debris above the Turks and Caicos Islands and Reuters captured a view from Haiti’s capital, Port-Au-Prince.

The company said it lost contact eight minutes after liftoff with its upgraded Starship upper stage, the top part of the rocket.

It was carrying the company’s first test payload of mock satellites.

“We did lose all communications with the ship. So, I mean that is essentially telling us that we had an anomaly with that upper stage. So we were just coming up to the end of that asset burn for the ship when we stopped until or when we started to lose, uh, a couple of the engines, we saw those dropping out and then we did lose telemetry from the ship.”

Elon Musk said a preliminary assessment showed an internal leak of liquid oxygen fuel led to the rocket’s breakup.

The incident caused airline flights over the Gulf of Mexico to reroute to avoid debris.

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration said it briefly slowed and diverted planes around the debris area, but that normal operations have resumed.

The FAA will likely open a mishap investigation.

That would ground Starship and check if debris fell on populated areas or outside the hazard zone.

A probe could delay Musk’s goal of 12 Starship tests this year, depending on fixes and an FAA investigation.

Though Musk, after the incident, said on X that, quote, ‘Nothing so far suggests pushing next launch past next month.’

He has repeatedly criticized the FAA for overreaching and making politically-motivated decisions.

Thursday’s mission was SpaceX’s seventh Starship test since 2023, part of Musk’s plan to build a rocket for Mars travel and launching satellites.

SpaceX’s test-to-failure method has led to big failures before, but Thursday’s happened during a mission phase it had passed before.