Shocking videos posted online show the rocket of Elon Musk’s doomed spacecraft sprinkling debris all over the south coast of Texas as it lifts off from the launch pad.
The massive 395-foot rocket blasted into the air from sunny Boca Chica, Texas, Thursday morning, but caught fire just four minutes after takeoff.
The explosion sent debris flying at thousands of miles per hour, damaging a car parked miles away, and sending a cloud of dust over the Gulf of Mexico on a sunny day.
Footage from thousands of meters away shows the dust cloud slowly sweeping across the area, kicking up debris and sending palm trees swaying in high winds before eventually starting to dissipate.
The images also showed the massive crater and shattered launch pad left in the missile’s wake.
The FAA has now grounded all of SpaceX’s Starship rockets while it investigates the failed launch.
Black smoke filled the blue sky in Boca Chica, Texas when a SpaceX Starship rocket exploded Thursday
The footage showed the dust cloud slowly sweeping across the area, scattering debris and palm trees swaying in the wind before eventually starting to dissipate.
The images also showed the massive crater and shattered launch pad left in the missile’s wake
The explosion occurred Thursday when the rocket failed to separate over the Gulf of Mexico, prompting the heads of SpaceX to destroy it.
Its mission was to see the craft explode 150 miles into the atmosphere before cruising for an hour and crashing into the Pacific Ocean.
The rocket took off with promise when the Starship ignited its 33 Raptor engines and lifted off the launch pad at 1,242 miles per hour.
It was about 25 miles above the ground when it was supposed to separate so that the booster would fall back to the ground and into the Gulf of Mexico,
However, the separation fails, causing the missile to spin and within seconds, the missile explodes over the ocean.
Officials said the FAA is now investigating the accident to ensure that “no system, process or procedure impacts public safety” as is its standard procedure.
However, SpaceX CEO Musk warned that such an outcome could occur during the test flight on Thursday, suggesting that the main goal of the launch was to clear the launch pad — which the spacecraft successfully completed.
And during a livestream of the company’s launch on Thursday, John Innsbruecker, SpaceX’s lead integration engineer, reminded the audience that “this was a development test.”
“It’s Starship’s first test flight,” he said. The goal is to collect data and as we said, clear the board and get ready to go again.
So you never know exactly what will happen. But as promised, excitement is guaranteed. And Starship has given us an amazing end to what has truly been an incredible test so far.
Other videos posted online showed the large dust cloud spreading over the Gulf of Mexico
In fact, the company is thinking of the launch as a success despite what it has classified as a “quick, unscheduled breakup.”
“We took down the tower, which was our only hope,” said Kate Tice, a quality systems engineer at SpaceX, during the livestreamed event.
SpaceX tweeted: “With testing like this, success comes from what we learn, and today’s testing will help us improve Starship reliability as SpaceX strives to make life multiplanetary.”
Musk also tweeted, “Congratulations Team SpaceX on the exciting test launch of the Starship! I learned a lot for the next test launch in a few months.
The missile is designed to be larger and more powerful than others of its kind, capable of lifting more than 100 metric tons into orbit.
It generates 17 million pounds of thrust, more than double the Saturn V rockets used to send the Apollo astronauts to the moon.
The idea is that Starship will be able to bring humans to Mars in the first step of Musk’s larger vision of making the human race “Multiplanetary Types.”
Ultimately he would like to establish a human colony on Mars and build cities on the red planet.
If those efforts are successful, Musk plans to use rockets to bring people to destinations in the “larger solar system,” including gas giants like Jupiter or one of its potentially habitable moons in the event of an apocalypse.
Under the plans of Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, the Starship will be able to bring humans to Mars
The missile successfully launched in its test on Thursday, but failed to separate
Starship is larger and more powerful than the SLS and is capable of lifting payloads of more than 100 metric tons into orbit. Generates 17 million pounds of thrust, more than double the Saturn V rockets used to send Apollo astronauts to the Moon
But the outburst has some elected officials questioning whether more commercial regulations for spaceflight are needed.
House Transportation Aviation Subcommittee Chairman Jarrett Graves, a Louisiana Republican, said he doesn’t want to do anything that impedes the progress of innovation in commercial space.
“But obviously,” he said, “you have to balance that with safety.” Politico. “And so we’ll continue to work with the National Transportation Safety Board.”
Meanwhile, Tammy Duckworth, chairman of the Senate Commercial Aviation Subcommittee, said lawmakers need to clarify which agency will be responsible for regulating the space tourism industry.
“We have to decide who will organize this kind of travel,” she said. “Will it be the FAA or will it be NASA?”
However, she noted, “NASA is not a regulatory agency the way the FAA is — it sets the rules and policies for how we do commercial passenger travel and commercial freight.”
“We need to sit down and rally around who’s going to be responsible for this — an agency that has a lot of experience, or a space agency that doesn’t have experience moving the logistics stuff around the way the FAA works,” Duckworth said. “So we have to see.”
