SpaceX’s huge Super Heavy-Starship rocket, the most powerful ever built, blasted off on its third test flight Thursday morning, successfully boosting the unpiloted upper stage into space. While both stages broke apart during separate descents to ocean splashdowns, company officials hailed the flight as a major step forward.

Spectacular live video from a camera mounted on one of the Starship’s fins showed the red glow of re-entry heating as the spacecraft fell back into the lower atmosphere, growing more and more intense until the Starship was engulfed in a brilliant fireball. Insulation tiles on its belly experienced temperatures higher than 2,500 degrees.

Telemetry stopped flowing at an altitude of about 40 miles, indicating the Starship broke up before it was able to carry out a rocket-powered descent to a destructive splashdown in the Indian Ocean. But making it all the way from launch, to space and then deep enough into the atmosphere to experience peak heating was viewed by the company as a major accomplishment.

Telemetry was lost shortly after the spacecraft began falling through the zone of peak heating, experiencing temperatures higher than 2,500 degrees. While the Starship did not survive re-entry, SpaceX said the data collected during the test would help engineers improve performance during the next test flight.

Even so, the Federal Aviation Administration said in a post on X the loss of both stages constituted a “mishap” and that the agency “will oversee the SpaceX-led mishap investigation.”

The test flight began at 9:25 a.m. EDT when the giant rocket’s 33 Raptor engines, gulping 40,000 pounds of liquid oxygen and methane propellants per second, thundered to life with a ground-shaking roar.