What went wrong during the first Starship flight?

First there was the massive brown cloud that spread outward from beneath the rocket as its engines fired up. It contained dirt, rocks and even boulder-size concrete chunks that the force of the rocket thrust excavated from beneath the launch pedestal.

And then as Starship rose into the air, it tipped to the side. Three of the booster’s 33 engines had failed to start, and the unbalanced thrust caused the leaning ascent.

Starship cleared the launch tower, and then for much of the next minute, the flight seemed to be going well. But there were signs that more was going wrong. Cameras pointed at the bottom of Starship seemed to show that six of the engines had failed. The booster was to separate from the upper stage at 2 minutes, 52 seconds into flight, but it never did. Instead, Starship started tumbling slowly, and a minute later, explosives meant to destroy a rocket that has gone off course finally exploded.

A week later, Mr. Musk offered preliminary answers about what had gone wrong during a question-and-answer session on Twitter, now named X.

“Some good news items here,” he said. “The vehicle’s structural margins appear to be better than we expected,” pointing to the moments of the flight. “The vehicle is actually doing somersaults towards the end and still staying intact,” he said.