While Elon Musk was spinning the explosion of his SpaceX Starship as a success and the media was fawning over the launch, south Texas residents and researchers were left dealing with the debris and environmental damage far beyond the expected area.
CNBC explains Musk’s latest blunders:
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, speaking publicly on Twitter Spaces on April 16 ahead of the test flight, acknowledged that a vehicle with 33 engines is akin to “a box of grenades,” and that the Starship vehicle was not likely to reach orbit but was likely to explode.
However, Musk and SpaceX did not accurately predict that their launchpad would be destroyed, nor that particulate matter would rain down on residents and habitat as far away as Port Isabel, a town about six miles from the launchpad, and South Padre Island, a few miles up the coast from the site.
Images captured during the test flight show that the SpaceX launch pad also exploded, with concrete chunks from it flying in multiple directions leaving behind a giant crater underneath. According to Dave Cortez, the Lone Star chapter director for the Sierra Club, a 501c4 environmental advocacy group, “Concrete shot out into the ocean, and risked hitting the fuel storage tanks which are these silos adjacent to the launch pad.”
The result is that SpaceX’s Starship Super Heavy launch program has been grounded while there’s a “mishap investigation,” which the FAA told CNBC is standard practice.
Meanwhile, Texans are paying the price.
Texas Public Radio has more on the environmental damage:
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) documented that the debris cloud deposited material as far as six-and-a-half miles north of the launch pad. The agency said in a statement that the debris cloud was made of pulverized concrete.
The launch pad’s destruction could be seen in the mudflats and dunes south of it and in the algal flats to the north. Broken concrete — some pieces the size of golf balls, others the size of car engine blocks or larger — was spread out over nearly three-quarters of a mile in some directions.
Craters from large pieces of concrete were as large as six feet across and a few feet deep. Some pieces hit the ground so hard they were submerged in the sand, leaving only an empty crater with rebar jutting from it.
…
Vegetation within a few hundred yards of the launch pad was singed. A little more than a quarter mile south of the launch pad, a fire burned about three acres, charring a quail’s nest.
Salt-like particulate matter could be seen all over the mudflat south of the launch pad.
On the algal mudflats north of the launch pad, concrete, metal, the salt-like particulate and rebar could be found more than half a mile away. In total, according to USFWS, around 385 acres of land was affected by debris.
Reason number a zillion why I would never buy a car or anything else from Musk.
