*

Starship prototype fails after launch from Texas, forces

airlines to alter course

*

Upper stage anomaly leads to loss of Starship

*

Super Heavy booster successfully returns to launchpad

*

Starship had multiple upgrades, poised to deploy mock

satellites

(Adds FAA, Blue Origin details in paragraphs 7-8, 10)

By Joey Roulette

WASHINGTON, Jan 16 (Reuters) - A SpaceX Starship rocket

broke up in space minutes after launching from Texas on

Thursday, forcing airline flights over the Gulf of Mexico to

alter course to avoid falling debris and setting back Elon

Musk's flagship rocket program.

SpaceX mission control lost contact with the newly upgraded

Starship, carrying its first test payload of mock satellites but

no crew, eight minutes after liftoff from its South Texas rocket

facilities at 5:38 p.m. EST (2238 GMT).

Video shot by Reuters showed orange balls of light

streaking across the sky over the Haitian capital of

Port-au-Prince, leaving trails of smoke behind.

"We did lose all communications with the ship - that is

essentially telling us we had an anomaly with the upper stage,"

SpaceX Communications Manager Dan Huot said, confirming minutes

later that the ship was lost.

The last time a Starship upper stage failed was in March

last year, as it was reentering Earth's atmosphere over the

Indian Ocean, but rarely has a SpaceX mishap caused widespread

disruptions to air traffic.

At Miami International Airport, some flights were grounded,

according to a Reuters witness. Dozens of commercial flights

diverted to other airports or altered course to avoid potential

debris, based on flight records from tracking website

FlightRadar24.

The Federal Aviation Administration, which regulates private

launch activities, said it had briefly slowed and diverted

planes around the area where space debris was falling, but

normal operations had since resumed.

The FAA regularly closes airspace for space launches and

reentries, but it can create a "debris response area" to prevent

aircraft from entering if the space vehicle experiences an

anomaly outside the originally closed zone.

SpaceX CEO Musk posted a video on X showing the debris field

and said: "Success is uncertain, but entertainment is

guaranteed!"

The failure came a day after Blue Origin, billionaire Amazon ( AMZN )

founder Jeff Bezos' space company, successfully

launched its giant New Glenn rocket into orbit for the first

time.

The Starship upper stage, 2 meters (6.56 feet) taller than

previous versions, was a "new generation ship with significant

upgrades," SpaceX said in a mission description prior to the

test. It was due to make a controlled splashdown in the Indian

Ocean roughly an hour after its launch from Texas.

The mission was SpaceX's seventh Starship test since 2023 in

Musk's multibillion-dollar effort to build a rocket capable of

ferrying humans and cargo to Mars, as well as deploying large

batches of satellites into Earth's orbit.

SpaceX's test-to-failure development approach has in the

past included spectacular failures as the company pushes

Starship prototypes to their engineering limits. Thursday's test

failure, though, occurred in a mission phase that SpaceX has

flown through previously.

The towering Super Heavy booster, meanwhile, returned to its

launchpad roughly seven minutes after liftoff, as planned,

slowing its descent from space by reigniting its Raptor engines

as it hooked itself on giant mechanical arms fixed to a launch

tower.