MIAMI – South Florida residents were shaken by the mid-air explosion of a SpaceX starship eight minutes into its test flight Thursday evening, causing debris that posed a threat to nearby airplanes and leading to flight stoppages in South Florida and the Caribbean.
Radio transmissions started going out from Miami, from Puerto Rico, and from other pilots in the air after the uncrewed SpaceX rocket exploded shortly after takeoff from Texas. A debris response field was quickly activated, one that engineers had mapped out earlier, just in case something like this ever happened.
“There’s an engineer at SpaceX. It says, here’s the route of the ship and here’s what should happen, and from the altitude if we do have a problem, here’s what the debris feel would be,” aviation attorney and former Air Force fighter pilot Willard Shepard said.
Shepard said air traffic controllers started telling all the pilots in the area to avoid that pre-mapped field.
“It could be the size of a penny, but it’s coming from that altitude, at that velocity that it’s falling, you could cause tremendous damage,” he said.
The Federal Aviation Administration halted flights at Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Palm Beach and Orlando airports while on the lookout for “falling space debris.”
The mid-air emergency prompted questions for SpaceX and its founder, Elon Musk, as the FAA, which certifies the flights, had just investigated another SpaceX explosion just over a month ago.
“Clearly, there’s going to be another investigation,” Shepard said. “We’ve had this happen twice. Why is this happening?”