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SpaceX’s giant Starship rocket reached orbit on its third attempt on Thursday but failed at the final hurdle of its test mission as it attempted to return to Earth.

After roughly an hour of almost flawless flight, helping to boost the viability of the world’s biggest rocket, Starship appears to have broken up on re-entry.

SpaceX’s mission control lost communications with Starship soon after it re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere and engineers quickly confirmed that the spaceship had been lost.

This is the third loss of a Starship in less than 12 months after the previous two test flights ended in explosions.

In a post on X, the Federal Aviation Administration said it would oversee an investigation into the “mishap”, which “involved both the Super Heavy booster and the Starship vehicle”.

But the test mission passed several critical milestones following the launch from SpaceX’s Starbase spaceport in Boca Chica, Texas. The 120 metre-tall Starship was able to open and close its payload doors in space, transfer propellant from one fuel tank to another and restart its Raptor engine in flight.

“We are farther than we have ever been before,” Dan Hewitt, SpaceX’s senior mechanical design engineer, declared on the company’s livestream just nine minutes into the flight, amid deafening cheers from the crowds at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California.

SpaceX intends to launch at least four more test rockets in the coming months. The test flight takes SpaceX a step further in demonstrating its rocket technology and ability eventually to carry payloads weighing 150 tonnes into orbit. Nasa is also relying on Starship to land humans on the Moon as part of the US space agency’s Artemis programme. 

SpaceX founder Elon Musk has said he aims to cut the costs of launch to less than $10mn per flight with a reusable variant of Starship, substantially lower than the company’s smaller Falcon 9 rocket at roughly $67mn. A report this year by consultancy Bain suggested Starship could reduce the cost per kilogramme to reach low-Earth orbit by 50 to 80 times. 

Its vast capacity was expected to accelerate the development of a commercial space economy, Bain said.

“It will allow for more business cases to close for companies that hope to offer services in space — everything from communications and remote sensing satellite companies to commercial space stations, on-orbit manufacturing and asteroid mining operations,” the report stated.

However, Starship could also undermine the business cases of the hundreds of rocket start-ups that have been launched globally in recent years, which all hope to tap into rising demand for satellite services. Euroconsult, a space market consultancy, forecasts that an average of more than 2,800 satellites will be launched annually between 2023 and 2032.

Musk announced plans for the superheavy lift rocket in 2012 to fulfil his ambition to carry humans to Mars. When Starship finally lifted off for the first time in April last year, the mission malfunctioned. The rocket was deliberately destroyed by the engineers roughly four minutes into the flight to avoid an uncontrolled landing.

The second test in November lasted long enough to take the rocket to the edge of space, but it too malfunctioned eight minutes into the flight.

Musk and SpaceX’s engineers have refused to label either test a failure, saying crucial lessons were learned for subsequent missions.