itstargetnews
The final breakup of SpaceX’s test flight was a spectacular sight, with shattered parts of the rocket streaking across the Caribbean sky like tendrils of jellyfish on Thursday night.
But some experts say that focusing on that flashy light show, as many people and the media have done, highlights a lack of understanding of the environmental consequences of spacecraft malfunctions.
Moriba Jah, a professor of aeronautical engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, compares it to admiring the beauty of a nuclear bomb’s mushroom cloud.
“To be mesmerized by the magic of the shards (is) not to understand what it implies,” Jah said. “These things can harm ecosystems, they can affect populations.”
There is also a more immediate threat, illustrated by this incident, of several tons of burning wreckage falling on the water and, although the odds are slim, perhaps even on some unfortunate piece of land.
Risks in airspace
Thursday’s Starship test — which consisted of two parts, the Starship’s upper stage (in this case, Ship 33) and the Super Heavy Booster’s lower stage — lasted about eight and a half minutes. The audience then saw the most powerful rocket ever made successfully separate both stages, impressively “chopstick” catcher of Super Heavy boosters.
Social media video taken in Turks and Caicos shows debris streaking across the sky after the new Starship rocket disintegrated during a test flight.
But soon after, SpaceX says it lost contact with a higher-up. Eventually, the confused and amazed people of Turks and Caicos saw their evening sky lit up by the wreckage of Ship 33.
Elon Musk, billionaire, CEO of SpaceX, suggested the cause was “an oxygen/fuel leak in the cavity above the marine engine firewall.” SpaceX says it is looking into what went wrong in cooperation with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which requires “accident investigation,” as happened when the Starship test flight exploded in 2023.
The flight path started from Boca Chica, Texas and headed east over the Caribbean Sea. Spaceflights like these provide airspace warnings in advance, but the loss of communication prompted another, more urgent one.
The FAA said in a statement that it “briefly slowed and diverted the aircraft” to where the debris was falling. The result was flights being delayed, circling in place or turning around.
Some pilots could even see the fireworks from their cockpits.
And for Jah, the risks, even if they are small, are not fully communicated to the passengers on the plane.
“If you and I got on a plane and somebody said, ‘Hey, the odds are one in 10,000 that you’re not going to make it,’ I wouldn’t get on the plane,” Jah told CBC News from Austin, offering some hypothetical odds.
Boley agrees, saying the risks and costs of the spaceflight industry are being exported to the aerospace industry.
Interruption is difficult to model
This flight is believed to have broken up over the Atlantic Ocean, and there are no reports of injuries or sightings of debris.
Aaron Boley, co-director of the Space Institute and an expert on space sustainability, says he doesn’t even feel like these ships are falling apart.
“The extent of the debris field, how much debris, how much lethal debris — meaning how many pieces are falling at speeds that can cause significant damage — are things that are not well understood at this point,” said Boley, who is also an associate professor at the University of British Columbia.
Jah agrees, calling the simulations “woefully poor at being able to predict anything with any meaningful accuracy” and relying on a “strategy of hoping” that the disconnect causes no harm.
‘Marked danger area’
Even the most successful ending to this Starship launch was going to go down in the water anyway – but by far, with a crash in the southern Indian Ocean.
A splash zone is a ‘designated hazard area,’ where it is assumed that there is less risk to human life in such remote areas. However, even planned descents cause disruption to air traffic. Says the Australian airline Qantas SpaceX re-entries have forced delays in recent weeks when he flew over the Indian Ocean.
Spraying down there “is the least worst option,” Boley said, giving people a chance to know roughly where and when things might fall.
But the worst way for debris to fall is uncontrolled explosions like Thursday’s, which is a roll of the dice.
“You just assume that these pieces are spread over enough of an area that it’s unlikely that they’re actually going to hit somebody and cause damage,” Boley said.
A riskier future
Because of all this uncertainty, experts say there isn’t a very good sense of how missile debris affects the marine environment.
Research In 2016, from the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research in New Zealand conducted a review of the potential short- and long-term dangers posed by rocket debris to life in the nearby ocean.
The panel of experts found that 10 launches, successful or not, each resulting in 40 tons of debris “would still pose a minor risk.”
But more launches means more risk.
“At 100 launches the risks could be moderate, and at 1,000 they could become high,” they warned.
Stopping spaceflight research isn’t the answer, experts say — but given the speed of the industry’s growth, greater emphasis should be placed on calculating environmental risks.
“What statistics are we going to stick with?” Jah asks. “What kinds of tests will we require for humans to successfully explore space, but not at the expense of environmental sustainability?”
