SpaceX launched Starship Flight 15 at 5:47 p.m. ET Friday from Starbase, Texas, and the Super Heavy booster separated cleanly about two minutes and 20 seconds after liftoff.

But a little more than six minutes into flight, flight controllers ordered the booster diverted to a Gulf of Mexico splashdown because of a technical problem, and long-range cameras captured it exploding in a fireball moments before hitting the water, CBS News reports.

SpaceX had already caught a Super Heavy booster three times before using the mechanical arms on its launch tower, so Friday's failure was unexpected for a company that had rehearsed the maneuver successfully.

'Well, that certainly isn't the news that we had hoped to hear for today,' SpaceX launch commentator Kate Tice observed, adding that the decision was in line with rigorous safety checks to protect the pad, per the Associated Press coverage carried by WCVB.

No explanation was given for what went wrong. This was also the first catch attempt for the upgraded 236-foot Version 3 booster, the production model for moon and Mars expeditions, making the loss the more notable.

Despite the booster loss, the mission's unprecedented objective remains on the table: the first time Starship will try to return from orbit and be plucked in midair by mechanical arms secured to the launch tower.

The spacecraft portions of all 14 previous Starships ended up in the ocean, either by design or in flaming wreckage, according to the AP report.

Ship 42 was performing well in orbit, and flight controllers forgoed an early-return splashdown option off Hawaii at the 90-minute mark, space.com reports, meaning this is now the longest Starship mission ever flown — up to 22 hours and roughly 15 laps around Earth at about 170 miles altitude.

Per CBS News, a final 'return check' Saturday is followed by a single Raptor burn at 3:21 p.m. ET to lower Starship's orbit for a 56-minute belly-first reentry.

The ship will steer over sparsely populated areas of northern Mexico and southern Texas, avoiding Rio Grande Valley cities, before firing three Raptors to flip upright near the pad and descending between the gantry's mechanical arms to be snagged with one engine firing.

If problems develop, controllers can tumble Starship to break it up over the ocean, or send it into the Gulf if the tower itself is compromised.

The original Flight 15 goal was to retrieve every piece of the rocket for future recycling — something yet to be achieved anywhere in the world — which Musk sees as the key to launch rates necessary for moon bases and Mars missions.

SpaceX's launch vice president Kiko Dontchev said scaled-up infrastructure plus full reusability is 'how you go from zero launches to 10 to 100 to 1,000 to 10,000 to 100,000,' per AP.

SpaceX plans Starship launches from Florida within a few months and Louisiana in a few years, and NASA is paying SpaceX billions to land Artemis astronauts on the moon, with Administrator Jared Isaacman noting on X that he looks forward to Starlink capability on Artemis III.

Musk told investors in October, per Houston Public Media, 'If we don't succeed in Flight 15, we'll get there,' pointing to a steady stream of Starship flight attempts through the end of the year and accelerating into next year.

Meanwhile, NASA will decide a year before the Artemis IV landing whether to use Starship or Blue Origin's Blue Moon, and astronauts will practice docking with both vehicles during next summer's Artemis III mission, per the AP.