The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) temporarily halted departures at four major Florida airports — Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Orlando, and Palm Beach — for over an hour, as a SpaceX Starship test flight ended in failure on Thursday (March 6), scattering debris across parts of the Caribbean and triggering widespread flight disruptions near Turks and Caicos.
According to a Reuters report, the normal operations resumed around 8 p.m. ET (0100 GMT on Friday). The FAA confirmed that outbound flights from these airports experienced average delays of approximately 45 minutes due to the SpaceX incident.
During the fallout, the FAA established a debris response zone and briefly slowed or paused air traffic in affected areas. Following the mishap, the FAA has directed SpaceX to conduct a full investigation into the failure and loss of the Starship vehicle.
Starship test ends in fiery failure
SpaceX’s colossal Starship spacecraft exploded in space on Thursday, just minutes after launching from Texas, prompting the FAA to temporarily halt air traffic across parts of Florida. This marks the second consecutive failure this year for Elon Musk’s ambitious Mars rocket program.
Multiple videos circulating on social media captured fiery debris streaking across the evening skies near South Florida and the Bahamas, following Starship’s breakup in space. Moments before the explosion, the spacecraft was seen spinning uncontrollably with its engines shut off, as shown in SpaceX’s live broadcast of the mission.
This latest failure, the eighth Starship test, comes barely a month after the seventh ended in similar disaster. Both back-to-back failures occurred during early mission phases — stages that SpaceX had previously cleared without issue — highlighting a concerning setback for Musk’s accelerated timeline for the program.
Standing at 403 feet (123 meters) tall, Starship is a critical piece of Musk’s vision to land humans on Mars, a goal he hopes to achieve as early as the next decade.