On January 16^th, 2025, SpaceX launched it huge Starship rocket for its 7^th test flight from Starbase in Texas. The launch was the first flight of a new upper stage: the Block 2 Ship. It has a different forward flap design, a 25% increase in propellant capacity, redesigned avionics, an upgraded thermal protection system and an higher-thrust engines.
Lift-off occurred at 22:37 UTC (4:37 pm CST, local time). 2 minutes and 40 seconds after launch the upper stage Starship fired its engines and separated from the first stage Super Heavy. Super Heavy performed a boostback burn to return to the launch site and almost 7 minutes into flight it was successfully catched by the “chopstick” arms of the launch tower. All seemed to go well, but apparently the engines of the Ship started to fail. Telemetry was lost 8 minutes and 26 seconds after launch. It exploded over the Turks and Caicos Islands with the debris likely reentering over the ocean north of Puerto Rico and the British Virgin Islands, prompting airspace closures in the region.
SpaceX had planned a controlled landing in the Indian Ocean for the upper stage and it featured a “pez-dispenser” that would deploy 10 Starlink internet satellite mass simulators. They were designed to pave the way for deployments of the advanced Starlink V3 version.
After the mission, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk stated that a propellant leak was the probable cause of Ship’s failure: “Preliminary indications suggest an oxygen/fuel leak in the cavity above the ship engine firewall, which was substantial enough to build pressure beyond the venting capacity.”

On December 27^th, 2024 China made its 68^th and last launch attempt of the year. A Kinetica-1 (Lijian-1)  rocket was launched at 01:03 UTC from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in Gansu Province.
The initial launch of the solid propelled rocket went well as the first and second stage performed as expected. The third stage lost attitude three seconds after its ignition however, and the self-destruction was triggered to destroy the launcher. Chinese commercial rocket firm CAS Space, which developed the rocket, is investigating the mishap. Some form of attitude instability is a likely cause.
The Kinetica carried eleven satellites on this 6^th launch of the rocket, all of them Chinese with the exception of one French spacecraft. The target orbit was Sun-synchronous. The most important payload was Liangxi, also called DEAR 3 (Discovery Exploration Advanced Recovery). It was a  prototype recoverable science experiment spacecraft built by AZSPACE. The French satellite was a 2U cubesat called CASAA-Sat, designed by the Université d’Aix-Marseille. One of the missions of this small satellite was to characterize the Magnetic Anomaly of the South Atlantic.
Kinetica-1 is a four-stage solid-propellant launch vehicle with a height of 30 m and a 2.65 m diameter. It weighs 135 metric tonnes at lift-off. So far all of it missions targeted a Sun-synchronous orbit, to which it can launch a payload of 1.5 metric tonnes. The first five launches, between July 2022 and November 2024, were all successful.

On December 17, 2024, Japanese startup Space One, launched its Kairos rocket for the second time.
At first, the launch from Spaceport Kii seemed to go well, however, the vehicle appeared to lose attitude control around two minutes after lift-off. It seemed to tumble and created a corkscrew contrail. Several hours after lift-off, Space One officials said that a problem with the nozzle of the first stage or its attitude control system likely caused the failure.
The Kairos carried four cubesats and one microsatellite from the Taiwan Space Agency and a few Japanese companies. It is designed to launch up to 250 kg to a 500 km orbit with an inclination of 33 degrees. 150 kg could be launched to a sun-synchronous orbit. The rocket has three solid-fuel stages and a liquid propellant upper stage. It has a height of 18 m and diameter of 1.35 m.
The launcher was first launched on March 13, 2024, on a mission that also failed: the rocket exploded five seconds after lift-off. Its autonomous flight termination system commanded to destroy the vehicle due to a detected underperformance of the first stage.