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Looks like second stage broke up over Caribbean, videos of the debris (as seen from ground): https://x.com/deankolson87/status/1880026759133032662?t=HdHFLYqgka
by terramex 2y ago
Looks like second stage broke up over Caribbean, videos of the debris (as seen from ground):
https://x.com/deankolson87/status/1880026759133032662?t=HdHFLYqgkaQzu0l1W2xLZg https://x.com/deankolson87/status/1880026759133032662?t=HdHF...
https://x.com/realcamtem/status/1880026604472266800 https://x.com/realcamtem/status/1880026604472266800
https://x.com/adavenport354/status/1880026262254809115 https://x.com/adavenport354/status/1880026262254809115
Moment of the breakup:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DE52_hVSeQz/ https://www.instagram.com/reel/DE52_hVSeQz/
- oceanadventures 2y agoWhere can I find the heat tiles? Will they be landing near Puerto Rico?
- Cu3PO42 2y agoWhat a strangely beautiful sight. While I was excited to see ship land, I'm also happy I get to see videos of this!
- afavour 2y agoAs long as the debris has no effect wherever it lands, I agree with you
- verzali 2y agoA lot of flights seem to be diverting to avoid it... https://bsky.app/profile/flightradar24.com/post/3lfvhpgmqqc24 https://bsky.app/profile/flightradar24.com/post/3lfvhpgmqqc2...
- ralfd 2y agoUnderstandable, but an over reaction. Any debris not burning up is falling down after minutes.
- Kye 2y agoWould you bet hundreds of lives and millions of dollars on that?
- ricardobeat 2y agoYes. Space debris near orbiting speeds doesn't fall straight down, it's simple physics. If anything planes much further downrange (thousands of km) should be diverted, not immediately under the re-entry point.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ceejayoz 2y agoIt wasn’t at orbital speeds yet.
- ricardobeat 2y agoOver 21000km/h when it broke up, compared to ~28k for stuff orbiting in LEO. Should still go quite far.
- ceejayoz 2y agoYes, although drag is gonna be… substantially higher like this as well.
- InDubioProRubio 2y agoDoes melting down not reshape metallic particles into ideal droplett parts ?
- ceejayoz 2y agoNo. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/02/world/africa/kenya-space-debris-rocket.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/02/world/africa/kenya-space-...
- Kye 2y agoDoes SpaceX bother with NOTAM for its launches? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOTAM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOTAM It seems like the flights should have been planned around it so no diversion would be needed.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- enragedcacti 2y agoThey do but its not clear to me whether the area where it broke up was actually included in the original NOTAM. The NOTMAR definitely does not according to the graphic shown on the NASASpaceflight stream. They are still live so I can't link a time code but something like -4:56 in this stream as of posting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nM3vGdanpw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nM3vGdanpw
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- kla-s 2y agoSince i couldn't find the time code in the video, i put a map together with both NOTAM and NOTMAR. map: https://github.com/kla-s/Space/blob/main/Map_NOTMAR_NOTAM_SpaceX_Starship_Test_Flight_7.png https://github.com/kla-s/Space/blob/main/Map_NOTMAR_NOTAM_Sp... description: https://github.com/kla-s/Space/tree/main https://github.com/kla-s/Space/tree/main Lets hope this is the year of Linux desktop and i didn't violate any licenses or made big errors ;)
- sbuttgereit 2y agoMy understanding is that there are areas which are noted as being possible debris zones across the flight path, but that aircraft are not specifically told to avoid those areas unless there an actual event to which to respond. If my understanding is correct, it seems sensible at least in a hand-wavy way: you have a few places where things are more likely to come down either unplanned or planned (immediately around the launch site and at the planned deorbit area), but then you have a wide swath of the world where, in a relatively localized area, you -might- have something come down with some warning that it will (just because the time it takes to get from altitude to where aircraft are). You close the priority areas, but you don't close the less likely areas pro-actively, but only do so reactively, it seems you'd achieve a balance between aircraft safety and air service disruptions.
- dylan604 2y agoMore as long as there were no humans onboard
- Molitor5901 2y agoI felt.. bad watching that breakup, it reminded me of Columbia.
- xattt 2y agoI don’t know why you’re getting downvoted, but I thought this too.
- Molitor5901 2y agoIt's a weird deja vu feeling of uneasiness. I can't explain it, but I think also Columbia really hit me as my generation's Challenger.
- throitallaway 2y agoMeta-commentary is annoying (yes, I realize the irony.)
- dpifke 2y agoWhich coincidentally launched 22 years ago today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-107 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-107
- Molitor5901 2y agoSeeing it streak across the sky just reminded me of how important this is and how critically SpaceX must get it right before sending anyone up. I will never forget the trepidation of watching Bob and Doug go up and in tears when it was clear they made it.
- birdman3131 2y agoI remember being woken up by the thunder from Columbia. Lost it over the years but I used to have a photo of about 20 vans of people parked on our property doing the search for debris. Don't think they found any on our land but there was a 3 ft chunk about 5 miles down the road.
- 2y ago
- ijidak 2y agoLooks like something out of a sci-fi movie.
- mrandish 2y agoThe number of SpaceX video clips that I know are "actual things really happening" which still activate the involuntary "Sci-Fi / CGI effect" neurons in my brain is remarkable.
- bigiain 2y agoYeah. I know that feeling. That tower catch. That _had_ to be a new version of Kerbal, right? The physics looked good, but there's no way that was real...
- mrandish 2y agoIndeed. The one that still flips a bit in my brain is the two Falcon rockets landing in unison side by side. I'd say it was high-end CGI except no director would approve an effects shot of orbital rockets landing in such a perfect, cinematically choreographed way. It would just be sent back to ILM marked "Good effort, but too obviously fake. Rework to be more realistic and resubmit."
- TMWNN 2y agoSeeing a rocket land vertically goes against almost 70 years of what we "know" about rockets. Falcon 9 rockets landing on legs seem unnatural enough; now we have a rocket, the size of a 20-story building, landing on chopsticks. There are lots of vertical-landing rockets ... in science fiction, and only before Sputnik in 1957. Once actual space programs came about and lots of engineers understood just how difficult landing a rocket is compared to launching it, they all went away. Fictional vehicles became more and more complex to make them "realistic" (that is, consistent with real spacecraft on the news), or just didn't bother with the details at all and went to quasi-magic technologies like in Star Wars and Star Trek. SpaceX is taking us to the future by going with something from the past.
- mrandish 2y agoYes, both spectacular and beautiful. I guess Starship can now say what the legendary comedy actress (and sex symbol) of early cinema Mae West said: "When I'm good... I'm very good. But when I'm bad... I'm even better." :-) Combined with another tower catch, that's two spectacular shows for the price of one. Hopefully the onboard diagnostic telemetry immediately prior to the RUD is enough to identify the root cause so it can be corrected.
- TMWNN 2y ago>What a strangely beautiful sight. "My god, Bones, what have I done?"
- dotancohen 2y agoExcitement guaranteed
- badgersnake 2y agoIt’s a pretty expensive way to make fireworks.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- echoangle 2y agoProbably one of the most expensive fireworks (but probably still cheaper than the first Ariane 5 launch), but it looks very cool.
- m4rtink 2y agoI think the N1 test flights are also a contender. I still remember something about kerosene raining for 15 minutes after the explosion.
- TechTechTech 2y agoWhere will this debris land? Can it impact airplane routes?
- kylebenzle 2y agoHN comments is just reading strangers steam of consciousness now?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- s1artibartfast 2y agoeast of Turks and Caicos Islands in the Caribbean. Draw a line from Boca Chia to Turks and keep going
- adolph 2y agoA great circle line tho
- mh- 2y agohttps://x.com/DJSnM/status/1880032865209184354 https://x.com/DJSnM/status/1880032865209184354 >Commercial flights are turning around to avoid potential debris.
- lysace 2y ago[flagged]
- s1artibartfast 2y agoupvoted and flagged.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- inglor_cz 2y agoLooks like work of the Flight Termination System. Something measurable had to go very wrong.
- olex 2y agoWhile the telemetry was still going, you could see Ship engines going out one by one. Earlier when there was video there was what looked like flames visible inside one of the flap hinges, definitely shouldn't be there on ascent. Presumably something failed internally and caused the Ship to shut down before reaching target trajectory, at which point either FTS or the failure itself caused it to blow up, as seen on the Insta reel.
- enraged_camel 2y agoOn the NSF youtube channel they pointed out that at some point the methane indicator started decreasing much faster than the LOX indicator, which points to some sort of leak. It would explain why the engines started to shut down.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> Something measurable had to go very wrong Or slightly wrong. An FTS is programmed to be conservative. Particularly on unmanned flights. Doubly particularly on reëntry. Triply so on experiments bits.
- DeepYogurt 2y agoDepends on the programmers I guess ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> Depends on the programmers I guess It depends on the Air Force.
- BuyMyBitcoins 2y agoAll of the exception handling was spent on the try/catch of the booster.
- teractiveodular 2y agoThe last one is stage separation, not an explosion. You can clearly see the "exploded" rocket continuing to fly afterwards.
- Polizeiposaune 2y agoNo, if that was taken from the Bahamas, that's an explosion connected to the loss of the 2nd stage. Staging happens closer to the Texas coast and I don't believe you'd have line of sight to it from the Bahamas.
- pixl97 2y agoI'd say it might be after the loss of the craft. It was losing engines for a while then lost telemetry. This would have been a bit later when it started tumbling in the atmosphere on re-entry. Hopefully we'll know for sure in a few days.
- s1artibartfast 2y agoI dont think so. I think it is the breakup, with a large mass visible. most of the material will continue on until it parabolically renters and burns up in a visible manner
- olex 2y agoSeparation is much closer to the launch pad in Texas, the booster barely makes it downrange at all before turning around. This being filmed from the Bahamas with this much lateral velocity, gotta be the Ship breaking up. Likely the FTS triggered after enough engines failed that it couldn't make orbit / planned trajectory.
- walrus01 2y agoThat's for sure not stage separation, that's an explosion from the FTS rupturing the ship tanks.
- pixl97 2y agoEh I'm thinking more it was a reentry explosion from pressurized tanks. Engines had failed a while before then.
- s1artibartfast 2y agoMost Sci-Fi real footage I have ever seen. Edit: Reminds me of "The Eye" from star wars Andor https://youtu.be/9lrr0CWHDGA?t=43 https://youtu.be/9lrr0CWHDGA?t=43
- olex 2y agoInadvertently perfect timing for this footage. Glowing and backlit by the setting sun, against clear and already darkening evening sky... couldn't plan the shot any better if you tried. Let's hope no debris came down on anyone or anything apart from open water.
- andrewinardeer 2y agoI take it if SpaceX debris hit and destroyed a boat the owner can claim damages from SpaceX? Does international space law allow for this?
- HPsquared 2y agoIt's probably similar to if a US ship crashed into your yacht.
- dylan604 2y agoRules of the water says smaller ship yields right of way to bigger ship. Sounds like you screwed up if your yacht got hit by a bigger ship. Of course that applies when the vessels are not tied up. If a big ship his a docked boat, that's an entirely different scenario
- lmm 2y ago> Rules of the water says smaller ship yields right of way to bigger ship. Sounds like you screwed up if your yacht got hit by a bigger ship. Not necessarily. Steam is obliged to give way to sail, even when the sailing ship is much smaller.
- dotancohen 2y agoWhere do Methalox-powered vehicles lie in this hierarchy? And if the Starship is not under power yet falling and using the flaperons for control, is that considered "under sail" for purposes of right of way?
- 9cb14c1ec0 2y agoGiven that the engine telemetry shown on the broadcast showed the engines going out one by one over a period of some seconds, I could easily imagine some sort of catastrophic failure on a single engine that cascaded.
- s1artibartfast 2y agoIt could be many things, plumbing to the engines, tank leak, ect. You could see fire on the control flap actuators, so the ship interior was engulfed in fire at the same time the first engine was out.
- consumer451 2y agoGiven the huge spread of the debris, it must have been a decent sized boom, no? I mean that's got to be 10's of miles wide in this video. https://x.com/adavenport354/status/1880026262254809115 https://x.com/adavenport354/status/1880026262254809115
- walrus01 2y agothe flight termination system is sort of a shaped charge that's designed to rupture the oxidizer and fuel tanks. Even if only a few % fuel remains, it'll be a big boom.
- s1artibartfast 2y agoFor context, The lower stage reportedly has 150 tons of propellant on board when it lands.
- FuriouslyAdrift 2y agoThe whole thing (booster et al) is around 1/3 as tall as the Eiffel tower... for context
- 2y ago
- JumpCrisscross 2y agoWow. It reminds me of the comet scene from Andor. I wonder if suborbital pyrotechnics will become a thing one day.
- ralusek 2y ago> one day today!
- cubefox 2y agoMore views: https://youtube.com/watch?v=-S8CK6LgnD4 https://youtube.com/watch?v=-S8CK6LgnD4 https://x.com/DavidCaroe/status/1880036195985682710 https://x.com/DavidCaroe/status/1880036195985682710
- Medox 2y agoEven more: https://x.com/jp_ouellette/status/1880029255813459973 https://x.com/jp_ouellette/status/1880029255813459973 https://x.com/Sitting_Analyst/status/1880033972748709995 https://x.com/Sitting_Analyst/status/1880033972748709995 https://x.com/nickpags45/status/1880028951885816056 https://x.com/nickpags45/status/1880028951885816056
- iquatemb 2y agoSeen from an Airplane: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zC0K0YZEzg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zC0K0YZEzg
- ijidak 2y agohttps://www.instagram.com/reel/DE54iL7xbZL/?igsh=dTNtZ2Q4aHlxc20= https://www.instagram.com/reel/DE54iL7xbZL/?igsh=dTNtZ2Q4aHl... It's beautiful. Looks like something out of a sci-fi movie.
- hinkley 2y agoCue Aerosmith song.
- llm_trw 2y agoIs there a video you don't need to log in to view?
- nomilk 2y agoThe fourth one (instagram) doesn't require login. Side note: annoying that twitter/X requires login. I'd have sworn Elon said he was removing that requirement to login to view tweets (I think he discussed it with George Hotz). Found it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkNkSQ42jg4&t=49m30s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkNkSQ42jg4&t=49m30s Elon: > This is insane. You shouldn't need a twitter account at all unless you need to write something George: > Why did you put the pop up back? Elon: > We should not be prohibiting read-only scroll So there seems to be agreement that twitter shouldn't require an account to read (view) posts. The Twitter Space is from 23 Dec 2022 so perhaps things changed since.
- krick 2y agoMusk's promises never age well, but, really, this particular dialog should be a meme.
- llm_trw 2y agoInstagram requires login. Twitter does not.
- nomilk 2y agoI'd have sworn I was unable to view tweets recently without logging in. But maybe I was wrong. Instagram lets me view the video without login (I have to click the 'X' in the top-right of annoying popup, but I can watch it without logging in).
- andrewflnr 2y agoIt's not just you, they've been inconsistent about letting you see tweets.
- 2y ago
- krick 2y agoI'm not worried about the Starship itself, but it looks kinda dangerous. Is it?
- dmix 2y agoIt's very likely it exploded on purpose by SpaceX after it wasn't showing good data (aka Flight Termination System). Specifically over water.
- dpifke 2y agoPreliminary indication is that we had an oxygen/fuel leak in the cavity above the ship engine firewall that was large enough to build pressure in excess of the vent capacity. Apart from obviously double-checking for leaks, we will add fire suppression to that volume and probably increase vent area. Nothing so far suggests pushing next launch past next month. https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1880060983734858130 https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1880060983734858130
- coldtea 2y ago[flagged]
- fsloth 2y agoIt sounds like he's talking to investors and not to general public. In my experience in corporate america you communicate efficiency by proclaiming a checklist of things to do - plausible, but not necessarily accurate things - and then let engineers figure it out. Nobody cares of the original checklist as long as the problem gets resolved. It's weird but it seems very hard to utter statement "I don't have specific answers but we have very capable engineers, I'm sure they will figure it out". It's always better to say (from the top of your head) "To resolve A, we will do X,Y and Z!". Then when A get's resolved, everyone praises the effort. Then when they query what actually was done it's "well we found out in fact what were amiss were I, J K".
- dylan604 2y agoWatching those videos, my hand naturally looks for the roller ball from too much time playing missile command
- RecycledEle 2y agoI think this was the first test of StarShip v2. I'd be surprised if everything worked after they redesigned the whole StarShip. That would be like refactoring Microsoft Windows by hand-typing new code and expecting it to run without errors on the first try.
- oceanadventures 2y agoI have a boat and want to pick up floating heat tiles in the ocean, do you think we can find the parts by Puerto Rico?
- pinoy420 2y agoNo
- throw0101a 2y ago> (as seen from ground) As seen from a plane in the air with the break up right in front of it: https://old.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1i34dki/starship_blew_up_in_front_of_us_had_to_divert/ https://old.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1i34dki/starship_...
- IAmGraydon 2y agoThat is absolutely insane. Honestly, I would probably assume a MIRV given the current environment.
- mrandish 2y agoWhile the video post does mention "Right in front of us", and it may have appeared that way to the pilots, it wasn't. Gauging relative distance and altitude between aircraft in flight can be notoriously deceptive even to experts, especially in the case of intensely bright, massive, unfamiliar objects at very high speed and great distance. The RUD was in orbit over 146 kilometers up and >13,000 mph. I'm sure using the FlightAware tracking data someone will work out the actual distance and altitude delta between that plane and the Starship 7 orbital debris. I suspect it was many dozens of miles away and probably still nearly orbital in altitude (~100km). Spectacular light show though...
- hinkley 2y agoIt’s crazy how fast that ship is moving and how big the explosion was that it looks like something much, much lower in the air went boom. It was transitting the sky faster than a commercial aircraft does. So it gives an impression more like a private aircraft breaking up at 5-10k feet.
- raincole 2y agoDoes anyone know where the debris landed? In the ocean? Or just burnt out in the atmosphere?
- tjpnz 2y agoWasn't going fast enough to fully burn up. There'll be small pieces of debris scattered over quite a large area.
- rkagerer 2y agoWhat a show
- tsimionescu 2y agoAnother failure, another few months of figuring out why this isn't working and can't stick to its flight path. They caused chaos for many commercial planes, so they'll definitely need some full reports to the FTA to know what they're doing about this, why the debris is falling over flight paths, and so on.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- r0m4n0 2y agoDoes anyone know the timing of when the breakup actually occurred? I’m curious because I was on a flight to Puerto Rico from Florida at 3pm ET they diverted our flight. They didn’t really give us many details but said the “landing strips were closed”. Our friends on a slightly early flight diverted to ST Thomas. We were going to divert to a nearby airport in Puerto Rico (we were going to land in Aguadilla instead of San Juan) so I feel like these diversions wouldn’t be related but the timing seems pretty odd.
- espeed 2y agoDepending on the precise launch time (4:36/4:37 PM CST) "Ship exploded at ≈T+00:08:26": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_flight_test_7 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_flight_test_7