On January 16, SpaceX conceded that the latest prototype of its enormous Starship spacecraft had “experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly during its ascent burn” — a tongue-in-cheek admission that the massive rocket had exploded mid-flight.
Countless videos circulating online showed a massive stream of reentering pieces of the Starship rocket blazing across the evening sky over the West Indian islands of Turks and Caicos. It was a dazzling sight to behold as the destruction streaked across the sky, like something from science fiction.
“Success is uncertain, but entertainment is guaranteed!” a gleeful Musk wrote at the time.
But it wasn’t all fun and games. Residents of Turks and Caicos, for instance, soon found scraps of burnt rubber and other rocket pieces littering the Caribbean islands’ otherwise pristine beaches.
The incident, which was almost perfectly repeated on February 24, even forced airlines to quickly adjust their flight paths to avoid the terrifying field of burning metal.
And now, eleven months later, the Wall Street Journal has obtained Federal Aviation Administration documents revealing that three aircraft — a JetBlue passenger plane, an Iberia Airlines flight, and a private jet, carrying a total of 450 people total — were in far greater danger than SpaceX and government officials let on at the time.
The reporting also highlights the possibility that SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s extremely close relationship and ample influence in Washington, DC, may have played a role in FAA officials looking the other way as the company’s Starship rockets kept exploding during tests.
While all three planes landed safely on January 16, if any one of them had been struck by a piece of Starship debris, it could’ve been a major disaster.
Air traffic controllers had to scramble to ensure the planes were far away from the debris field, leading to an increase in their workload, a “potential extreme safety risk,” according to an FAA report obtained by the WSJ.
Air traffic controllers were left bewildered.
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