Car hit by debris from SpaceX launch

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Elon Musk’s ambitions for colonising Mars — and Nasa’s plans to return humans to the moon — edged one step closer as SpaceX’s mighty Starship thundered off the launch pad on an inaugural test flight, before a series of malfunctions sent it tumbling back to earth in a fireball.

It was the first fully integrated test flight of SpaceX’s futuristic transportation system — comprising Starship, the upper stage designed for carrying crew and cargo, stacked atop the Super Heavy booster. Tens of thousands of viewers crowded the shoreline to watch the historic lift-off from the Starbase site in Boca Chica, Texas.

Surpassing even the expectations of its chief designer — Musk himself, who had lacked confidence that it would even clear the launchpad — the 120m (394ft) mega rocket snatched a record off Nasa for the world’s most powerful rocket to go into operation as it soared to an altitude of 39km over the Gulf of Mexico.

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23 thoughts on “Car hit by debris from SpaceX launch”

  8. The only infrastructure that this launch damaged was SpaceX's own. That van was a camera car placed there intentionally by nasaspaceflight. SpaceX gave a clear "leave at your own risk" warning for all of the remote cameras on site. The way this is portrayed in the video is incorrect. Bad journalism

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  13. Oh you and your headline bullshit. You just want destruction and failure to be the big thing of each headline cycle. Perhaps a little research would help, but that would be actual reprting, and we all know how you feel about that.

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  15. I’m glad and amused folks think this is awesome. It’s not to me. First: the other day when they suspended the countdown, they were still loading propellant at six minutes to launch 🚀 (which they claimed they did not intend to do); I found that unsettling. The rocket, I would think, would have been fully prepared to launch minus testing all systems were go, not still filling up the tanks. I intuited that the actual flight would end in disaster. It did. Now, they are applauding a four minute flight at a cost of over a billion dollars. This is not awesome. It is not great. We cannot build smaller rockets that don’t fail and we try to fly this monster? We being NASA/spacex

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  16. The rocket blasted a crater under the pad, chewing up and pulverizing concrete and dirt and throwing it literally everywhere. What you see is not smoke, it's a dirt and dust cloud. It damaged the rocket engines, the nearby fueling "tank farm," and showered dust and debris all over the nearby town. The rocket failed to reliably ignite and begin flight on all engines, several more engines failed within the first two minutes of flight — likely from debris, it failed to follow the proper trajectory due to engine failures, it failed to reach the designated apogee prior to second stage ignition, it failed to shut down the main engine, it failed to perform the required maneuver to disengage the main stage prior to second stage ignition, it failed to ignite the second stage, it lost complete control and tumbled end over end until it broke and up was automatically destroyed — and this ALL without a payload. There's a reason the launch facilities for the NASA SLS look like the way they do. It's necessary to support the safe launch of a vehicle producing this sort of thrust. There's a reason the flame trench and water deluge system were developed and exist to this day as essential components to reduce launch pad and vehicle damage due to heat and vibration during launch of substantial rockets.

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