SpaceX performed the seventh test flight of the Starship rocket on Thursday, but the upper-stage uncrewed Starship spacecraft blew up in midair soon after separating from the first-stage Super Heavy booster.
Footage of the debris falling over the Caribbean started to show up on social media, with SpaceX boss Elon Musk posting that “entertainment is guaranteed” with each Starship launch.
But the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) may have found it to be more troublesome than entertaining, with the agency forced to alert pilots to a “dangerous area for falling debris of rocket Starship,” according to a CNBC report, which added that a number of flights above the Caribbean deviated from their intended route and, according to flight-tracking software, “appeared to be turning around, including commercial and cargo planes of JetBlue, Spirit, and FedEx.” The affected airlines have yet to make any public comment about the disruption caused to their flights.
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The FAA later confirmed that it had “briefly slowed and diverted aircraft around the area where space vehicle debris was falling,” adding that “normal operations have resumed.”
According to some of the footage that landed on social media, the rocket debris was spotted coming down close to the Turks and Caicos Islands in the Caribbean, around 1,600 miles (2,600 km) from SpaceX’s Starbase launch facility near Boca Chica, Texas.
SpaceX said it lost contact with the Starship soon after it separated from the Super Heavy booster, but it’s now investigating what caused the spacecraft to disintegrate during its flight. Had it gone to plan, the Starship would have performed a landing burn over the Indian Ocean about an hour after launch. But it wasn’t to be.
The first-stage booster, meanwhile, achieved SpaceX’s mission goal of returning to the landing site and nestling in the launch tower’s giant mechanical arms.
NASA is planning to use the Starship for flights to the moon and possibly even Mars as part of the Artemis program. In one of his final comments before leaving his post as NASA chief in a few days’ time, Bill Nelson said: “Congrats to SpaceX on Starship’s seventh test flight and the second successful booster catch. Spaceflight is not easy. It’s anything but routine. That’s why these tests are so important — each one bringing us closer on our path to the moon and onward to Mars through Artemis.”