By Joey Roulette

WASHINGTON (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.

Dozens of commercial flights diverted to other airports or altered course to avoid potential debris, according to flight tracking website FlightRadar24. Departures from airports in Miami and Fort Lauderdale, Florida, were also delayed by about 45 minutes, it added.

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 founder Jeff Bezos' space company, successfully launched its giant New Glenn rocket into orbit for the first time.

'NEW GENERATION SHIP'

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.

Musk said a preliminary assessment of the failure showed an internal leak of liquid oxygen fuel built up pressure and led to the rocket's breakup.

The FAA is likely to open a mishap investigation that would ground Starship - as the agency has done in the past - and examine whether any of the debris from the rocket's mid-flight blast fell on populated areas or outside of Starship's predetermined hazard zone.

The mishap threatens to derail Musk's goal to launch at least 12 Starship tests this year, depending on how quickly SpaceX can implement fixes and whether the FAA opens a mishap investigation.

"Nothing so far suggests pushing next launch past next month," Musk said.

The billionaire, who was appointed to a new government cost-cutting role by incoming President Donald Trump, has repeatedly criticized the FAA for overreaching and making politically-motivated decisions.

Musk called for FAA chief Mike Whitaker to resign in September, shortly after the FAA fined SpaceX and delayed one of its launches. Whitaker said in December he would step down before the start of Trump's term. A replacement has not been named.

The mission on Thursday 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.

(Reporting by Joey Roulette; Additional reporting by David Shepardson in Washington and Dan Catchpole in Seattle; Editing by Sandra Maler and Jamie Freed)