SpaceX launched the seventh test flight of its Starship rocket on Thursday but lost contact with the rocket's upper stage as it continued into space.

The company's webcast showed that data transmission stopped about nine minutes after the Starship was launched.

"We can confirm that we did lose the ship," said Kate Tice, senior manager of quality systems engineering at SpaceX.

SpaceX did not elaborate further, but losing Starship mid-flight could mean the rocket disintegrated.

Starship launched from SpaceX's private "Starbase" facility near Brownsville, Texas, shortly after 5:30 p.m. ET. Minutes later, the rocket's "Super Heavy" booster returned to the launch site and landed, marking SpaceX's second successful "catch" during the flight. It failed to grab the booster on its final flight.

There was no one on the Starship flight. However, Elon Musk's company is running 10 "Starlink simulators" in the rocket's payload bay and plans to try to deploy satellite-like objects in space. This will be a key test of the rocket's capabilities, as SpaceX needs Starship to deploy its next-generation Starlink satellites, which are larger and heavier.

While SpaceX didn't specify what the Starlink simulator is made of, mass simulators are commonly used in rocket vehicle development and are typically simple metal or concrete structures that weigh roughly the same as the object in question.

Before contact was lost, the Starship was scheduled to arrive in space, then fly half a circle around the Earth before reentering the atmosphere and crashing into the Indian Ocean about an hour after liftoff.

As with every previous flight, SpaceX aims to further advance development by evaluating the Starship's additional capabilities, including tests of its heat shield tiles and intense re-entry into orbit.

Although Starship is valued at $350 billion and already dominates the space industry, Starship is critical to the company's plans.

Starship is the tallest and most powerful rocket ever launched. Starship, fully stacked on Super Heavy boosters, is 403 feet tall and about 30 feet in diameter. Since April 2023, SpaceX has conducted six spaceflight tests of the complete Starship rocket system, with the frequency of testing steadily increasing.

The Super Heavy booster is 232 feet tall and is the starting point for the rocket's journey into space. There are 33 Raptor engines on its base, producing a total of 16.7 million pounds of thrust, about twice the 8.8 million pounds of thrust of NASA's Space Launch System rocket, which first launches in 2022.

The starship itself is 171 feet tall and has six Raptor engines - three for use in Earth's atmosphere and three that operate in the vacuum of space.

The rocket is powered by liquid oxygen and liquid methane. The entire system requires more than 10 million pounds of propellant to launch.

The Starship flying in this launch is labeled Ship 33 and also represents the second-generation version of the vehicle, known as "Block 2."

SpaceX noted that the vehicle's "significant upgrades" include changes to the flaps on the vehicle's nose, a redesigned propulsion system to improve performance, an enhanced flight computer, 30 cameras placed along the vehicle to monitor the rocket, and a reinforced heat shield. .

In addition, the booster for this flight attempt used reused Raptor engines. The engine was tested on its fifth test flight last year.

The Starship system is designed to be fully reusable and intended to be a new method of transporting cargo and people beyond Earth. The rocket is also critical to NASA's plans to return astronauts to the moon. SpaceX won a multibillion-dollar contract from the agency to use Starship as a crewed lunar lander as part of NASA's Artemis lunar program.