The upper stage of SpaceX's Starship rocket exploded minutes after launch from Texas on Thursday, leading the aerospace company to declare the vessel a "loss" in the seventh test flight of the heavy-lift spacecraft.

The 171-foot-tall (52 meters) spacecraft exploded over the Atlantic Ocean near the Turks and Caicos islands around 8.5 minutes after launch, creating a spectacular sky show witnessed by many people in the area. And a fair few of these folks posted their photos and videos on X, the social media site owned by SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk.

SpaceX launched Starship on Thursday for a seventh test flight, after weather concerns pushed back an experiment that will feature the spacecraft’s first payload deployment test, and while it successfully caught the Super Heavy Booster, Starship lost connection and “experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly.”