The damage to the launch pad went far beyond what experts were expecting. And nearby residents are left dealing with the environmental fallout.
Whether you put this up on the big screen now or bookmark it for a later session, NASA’s put together nearly an hour of 4K footage of the Earth with some relaxing music for your screensaving needs.
The videos were captured over the last year from the International Space Station during Expeditions 67 and 68.
This picture, apparently posted to a forum for Beechcraft airplane owners, claims to show the damage underneath the tower where Starship launched on Thursday.
In some video footage of the launch, you can see what’s said to be large pieces of concrete flying into the air along with Starship.
Elon Musk previously tweeted that not building in a flame diverter “could turn out to be a mistake,” but it looks like Starship dug one of its own anyway, prompting several people to say the company designed reusable rockets with single use launch mounts.
SpaceX’s official word on the flight test and explosion:
At 8:33 a.m. CT, Starship successfully lifted off from the orbital launch pad for the first time. The vehicle cleared the pad and beach as Starship climbed to an apogee of ~39 km over the Gulf of Mexico – the highest of any Starship to-date. The vehicle experienced multiple engines out during the flight test, lost altitude, and began to tumble. The flight termination system was commanded on both the booster and ship. As is standard procedure, the pad and surrounding area was cleared well in advance of the test, and we expect the road and beach near the pad to remain closed until tomorrow.
With a test like this, success comes from what we learn, and we learned a tremendous amount about the vehicle and ground systems today that will help us improve on future flights of Starship.
Thank you to our customers, Cameron County, and the wider community for the continued support and encouragement. And congratulations to the entire SpaceX team on an exciting first flight test of Starship!
A van holding cameras for the NASASpaceFlight crew took the impact of debris kicked up by SpaceX’s Starship launch yesterday, as seen in this grab from LabPadre’s broadcast.
But the dust didn’t stop there — the New York Times reports homes in cities miles away were covered in brown grime, supporting claims that the projections for environmental impact didn’t properly account for the power of the Super Heavy booster.
We don’t know why the first Starship test flight ended in flames, but this shot posted on Twitter by Michael Baylor provides the clearest look at the spacecraft as it started to go off the planned flight path.
On the NASASpaceflight YouTube stream, the hosts noted a report that 5 or 6 of the booster rocket engines shut down before the “rapid unscheduled disassembly” ended things entirely.
After years of waiting, the first orbital test flight for SpaceX’s Starship ended explosively after a few minutes. Now Elon Musk says in a tweet that the team “Learned a lot for next test launch in a few months.”
We know how it ended, but this is how the flight test began.
Subsequent tweets from SpaceX said, “As if the flight test was not exciting enough, Starship experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly before stage separation. Teams will continue to review data and work toward our next flight test. With a test like this, success comes from what we learn, and today’s test will help us improve Starship’s reliability as SpaceX seeks to make life multi-planetary. Congratulations to the entire SpaceX team on an exciting first integrated flight test of Starship!
That’s one way to describe the end of Starship’s first test flight. On the NASA Spaceflight stream, those who were present described it as a primarily auditory experience, so even the videos and GIFs may not capture whatever just happened.
The flight test didn’t make it all the way to Hawaii as projected, but it did clear the tower. From the streams, we could see some of the booster’s engines shutting down before it went into a spin, and eventually, the flight was terminated, as the craft blew up just a couple of minutes into the test flight.
