Commercial Jets Forced to Divert After Elon Musk's Starship Explodes, Raining Fiery Debris Through Sky

Scary.

Dodge This

While it may have provided an eye-popping spectacle for spectators on the ground, the mid-flight explosion of SpaceX's Starship on Thursday evening posed a serious threat to nearby aircraft.

As Reuters reports, the rocket's debris that rained down over the Caribbean forced airline flights over the Gulf of Mexico to change course to avoid being struck by the fiery remains.

The scale of the disruption was significant. The flight tracking website FlightRadar24 found that dozens of commercial flights — including cargo jets and passenger airliners from JetBlue and American Airlines — either altered course or were diverted to other airports to stay clear of the debris field, per Reuters. Some circled mid-flight, while others performed a hard-180.

Meanwhile, departures from airports in Miami and Fort Lauderdale, Florida, were delayed by about 45 minutes.

The Federal Aviation Administration said it was responsible for briefly slowing and diverting planes in the vicinity where the Starship debris was falling by creating a "debris response area." 

True to form, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk largely played off the event. "Success is uncertain, but entertainment is guaranteed!" he tweeted.

Rocket Science

The explosion occurred during the ascent burn of the rocket's 171-feet-tall upper stage, the Starship vehicle itself, roughly eight and a half minutes after liftoff, and about six minutes after successfully separating from its lower-stage.

SpaceX mission control said it lost contact with the vehicle shortly before the ship's "rapid unscheduled disassembly" — the company's euphemism for a sudden explosion.

"We did lose all communications with the ship — that is essentially telling us we had an anomaly with the upper stage," said SpaceX Communications Manager Dan Huot, per Reuters.

Offering an explanation, Musk tweeted that a preliminary investigation showed that a liquid oxygen leak in the cavity above the ship engine firewall caused a pressure buildup "in excess of the vent capacity."

Renowned astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell noted that the explosion was preceded by a chain of quickly unfolding engine failures, as indicated by the official livestream's telemetry data. Why that happened, and if that factored into the explosion, is unclear.

Major Hiccup

The ill-fated flight was the Starship's seventh so far, though it wasn't totally unfruitful: the rocket's lower stage, the Super Heavy booster, successfully returned to Earth, where it was caught by the "chopstick" arms of its launch tower.

Still, the upper stage's fiery demise may mark a serious stumble in the vehicle's progress. Previous prototypes have made it into orbit and returned in one piece for a splashdown in the Pacific, making this test a sobering step backward.

Given the spectacular nature of the destruction, it's also likely that the FAA will require a mishap investigation, as it has done in the past with Starship, which would result in the rocket being grounded, delaying its development schedule.

Musk, however, remains optimistic. "Apart from obviously double-checking for leaks, we will add fire suppression to that volume and probably increase vent area," he wrote on X. "Nothing so far suggests pushing next launch past next month."

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