FAA says SpaceX Starship explosion put passenger jets at “extreme safety risk”

A SpaceX Starship test flight explosion earlier this year placed multiple commercial airliners and hundreds of passengers at serious risk, according to newly disclosed records from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

The seventh uncrewed test flight of Elon Musk’s Starship rocket ended in a mid-air explosion shortly after liftoff from Texas, scattering debris into a busy flight corridor over the Caribbean. The FAA said the incident created a “potential extreme safety risk,” noting that FAA personnel had not been informed in advance.

Three passenger flights carrying around 450 people were directly affected. One aircraft was forced to declare a mayday emergency to land safely in San Juan. At the same time, another flight was warned it would continue “at your own risk” due to the possibility of debris remaining airborne for up to an hour. Air traffic controllers intervened to prevent two aircraft flying in close proximity from entering the suspected debris field.

Aviation experts warned that rocket debris poses a severe Foreign Object Damage (FOD) hazard, capable of disabling jet engines even when fragments are small—risks historically linked to major accidents such as the 2000 Concorde crash.

SpaceX later described the incident as a “rapid unscheduled disassembly” and emphasised the value of data gathered from the failed test, stating it would help improve Starship’s reliability. The company did not directly address the impact on civilian air traffic.