- SpaceX’s Starship exploded after spinning out of control during its eighth launch to space.
- An amateur astronomer took a stunning video of Starship spiraling and falling from space in flames.
- The footage shows how Starship created a space-debris hazard over southern Florida.
SpaceX’s Starship mega-rocket spiraled out, fell from space, and exploded spectacularly after its eighth launch on Thursday.
SpaceX lost the video feed from Starship and cut off its livestream after the vehicle started tumbling, but Scott Ferguson in Sarasota, Florida was recording the whole thing with a telescope.
His unique video footage shows Starship’s demise in detail. It also shows what a space-debris hazard the incident created, causing the Federal Aviation Administration to activate its space-debris protocol and briefly ground flights at airports in Orlando, Miami, Fort Lauderdale, and Palm Beach. If chunks of Starship came raining down, the FAA said, it didn’t want planes in the way.
In Ferguson’s video, below, Starship creates a bright, ghostly spiral in the sky with wisps of flame.
After about 45 seconds, the spiral becomes a fiery streak as the Starship plummets.
Ferguson, who has a neuroscience PhD and records space footage for his YouTube channel Astronomy Live, told Business Insider he had a camera and a telescope trained on Starship throughout its launch.
Suddenly, SpaceX’s webcast showed Starship tumbling and beginning to fall from space. It was likely to explode any minute.
SpaceX via X
Ferguson told BI he realized in that moment that the software he used to guide his telescope was lagging behind Starship’s actual position. He scanned the horizon and saw a bright flare in the southwestern sky. It looked like Starship was blowing up, bright enough for him to see with the naked eye.
He grabbed the joystick controlling his telescope and pointed it at the dying spaceship. By the time he had Starship in his telescope’s sights, mere seconds later, he said, it was already almost exactly due south.
“It goes very quickly,” Ferguson said.
He kept following it as it arced across the sky, traversing from the Gulf to the Atlantic Ocean as it fell from space.
By the end of his footage, just a few minutes later, the blaze of Starship had disappeared below the southeastern horizon.
Astronomy Live on Youtube
Ferguson was disappointed to see Starship explode, but pleased with his footage.
“I’m a fan of any big rocket,” Ferguson said, adding that he watched most of the Space Shuttle launches growing up.
NASA is counting on this vehicle to land astronauts on the moon for the first time since the Apollo era, a mission which it aims to fly in 2027.
However, this was Starship’s second flight in a row to explode before it finished reaching space.
“It gives me a lot of concern for what that timeline’s going to look like,” Ferguson said.
Elon Musk, the founder and CEO of SpaceX, said on X that the incident was “a minor setback” and another ship would be ready to fly in four to six weeks.
