SpaceX made some progress on another test flight of the world's most powerful rocket Tuesday, finally overcoming technical problems that plagued the program's two previous launches.

But minutes into the mission, SpaceX's Starship lost control as it cruised through space, then tumbled back into the atmosphere somewhere over the Indian Ocean nearly an hour after taking off from Starbase, Texas, the company's privately owned spaceport near the US-Mexico border.

SpaceX's next-generation rocket is designed to eventually ferry cargo and private and government crews between the Earth, the Moon, and Mars. The rocket is complex and gargantuan, wider and longer than a Boeing 747 jumbo jet, and after nearly two years of steady progress since its first test flight in 2023, this has been a year of setbacks for Starship.

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The Federal Aviation Administration gave the green light Thursday for SpaceX to launch the next test flight of its Starship mega-rocket as soon as next week, following two consecutive failures earlier this year.

The failures set back SpaceX's Starship program by several months. The company aims to get the rocket's development back on track with the upcoming launch, Starship's ninth full-scale test flight since its debut in April 2023. Starship is central to SpaceX's long-held ambition to send humans to Mars and is the vehicle NASA has selected to land astronauts on the Moon under the umbrella of the government's Artemis program.

In a statement Thursday, the FAA said SpaceX is authorized to launch the next Starship test flight, known as Flight 9, after finding the company "meets all of the rigorous safety, environmental and other licensing requirements."

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The payload fairing at the top of Gilmour Space's first Eris rocket was supposed to deploy a few minutes after lifting off from northeastern Australia. Instead, the nose cone fell off the rocket hours before it was supposed to leave the launch pad Thursday.

Gilmour, the Australian startup that developed the Eris rocket, announced the setback in a post to the company's social media accounts Thursday.

"During final launch preparations last night, an electrical fault triggered the system that opens the rocket’s nose cone (the payload fairing)," Gilmour posted on LinkedIn. "This happened before any fuel was loaded into the vehicle. Most importantly, no one was injured, and early checks show no damage to the rocket or the launch pad."

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SpaceX is having trouble with Starship's upper stage after back-to-back failures, but engineers are making remarkable progress with the rocket's enormous booster.

The most visible sign of SpaceX making headway with Starship's first stage—called Super Heavy—came at 9:40 am local time (10:40 am EDT; 14:40 UTC) Thursday at the company's Starbase launch site in South Texas. With an unmistakable blast of orange exhaust, SpaceX fired up a Super Heavy booster that has already flown to the edge of space. The burn lasted approximately eight seconds.

This was the first time SpaceX has test-fired a "flight-proven" Super Heavy booster, and it paves the way for this particular rocket—designated Booster 14—to fly again soon. SpaceX confirmed a reflight of Booster 14, which previously launched and returned to Earth in January, will happen on next Starship launch With Thursday's static fire test, Booster 14 appears to be closer to flight readiness than any of the boosters in SpaceX's factory, which is a short distance from the launch site.

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