Starship's eighth flight was a lot like its seventh.

SpaceX launched the eighth test flight of its Starship megarocket today (March 6), sending the 403-foot-tall (123 meters) vehicle aloft from its Starbase site in South Texas at 6:30 p.m. EST (2330 GMT; 5:30 p.m. local Texas time).

Seven minutes later, Starship's huge first-stage booster, known as Super Heavy, returned to Starbase for a dramatic catch by the launch tower's "chopstick" arms. It was the third time that SpaceX has demonstrated this jaw-dropping technique.

Starship's 171-foot-tall (52-meter-tall) upper stage — called Starship, or just "Ship" — kept flying, heading southeast toward the Atlantic Ocean. The Flight 8 plan called for Ship to deploy four payloads — dummy versions of SpaceX's Starlink internet satellites — on its suborbital trajectory about 17.5 minutes after liftoff before coming in for a controlled splashdown in the Indian Ocean off of Western Australia roughly 50 minutes later.

That didn't happen, however. Several of Ship's six Raptor engines conked out toward the end of its ascent burn, and the vehicle began to tumble. SpaceX lost contact with Ship about nine minutes into the flight, and it presumably detonated high in the sky shortly thereafter.

Today's results mirrored those of Starship Flight 7, which launched on Jan. 16. SpaceX pulled off a Super Heavy chopsticks catch on that day as well, and it lost Ship at about the same point in the mission.

"Obviously a lot to go through, a lot to dig through, and we're going to go right at it," SpaceX's Dan Huot said during live launch commentary today after Ship was lost. "We have some more to learn about this vehicle."

Spectators in the Bahamas spotted debris from Starship upper stage falling back to Earth in a fiery light show as the Ship vehicle broke apart.

If you can't see SpaceX's Starship in person, you can score a model of your own. Standing at 13.77 inches (35 cm), this is a 1:375 ratio of SpaceX's Starship as a desktop model. The materials here are alloy steel and it weighs just 225g.

SpaceX traced the Flight 7 anomaly to "a harmonic response several times stronger in flight than had been seen during testing, which led to increased stress on hardware in the propulsion system," the company wrote in a Feb. 24 update. That stress caused propellant leaks, which in turn triggered "sustained fires."

(The SpaceX-led investigation into the mishap is ongoing, but the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration recently gave the company permission to launch Flight 8 after completing a safety review.)