Spectacular images of debris from the Starship rocket’s second stage explosion that ignited the sky

SpaceX successfully recovered the first stage of its Starship rocket during a test flight on Thursday. However, the second stage exploded and its debris, passing through the Earth’s atmosphere, ignited the sky, giving rise to spectacular images.

The new test flight of the Starship megarocket, Thursday January 16, resulted in the spectacular disintegration of the upper stage above the Atlantic, as shown in these images captured and shared by intrigued Internet users, to see in our video at the top of the article.

“Are these shooting stars? »we hear a male voice ask in this scene filmed in the Turks and Caicos Islands, a British overseas territory located in the Caribbean, while the sky is streaked with long multicolored streaks, the scars of the explosion .

However, Starship’s seventh mission was crowned with great success since SpaceX succeeded in catching up with its first stage for the second time.

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A few minutes after the launch and the separation of the two levels, the booster descended in a controlled manner towards the launch pad, where it was immobilized by mechanical arms installed on the launch tower, nicknamed the « baguettes ».

This test flight was to be a show of force for Elon Musk’s company, a few hours after the success signed by Blue Origin, the space company of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, which carried out its first flight into orbit.

But the loud applause and cries of joy from the employees quickly died down when a manager announced the loss of communication with the second floor.

“We lost all communication with the ship”declared Dan Huot during a video broadcast, before specifying that there was “had an anomaly with the upper floor”.

“Unscheduled rapid disassembly”

SpaceX then confirmed on its networks that the Starship, giving its name to the entire rocket, had been the subject of a “unscheduled rapid disassembly”. In other words: it exploded.

“Success comes from what we learn, and today’s flight will help us improve Starship’s reliability”assured the company on X, a network of which Elon Musk is also the owner.

The latter specified on X that the explosion had probably been triggered by a “oxygen/fuel leak”.

For its part, the American aviation regulator, the FAA, reported having “briefly slowed and diverted aircraft around the area of ​​falling space vehicle debris”. “Normal operations have resumed”he added in a press release.

The outgoing boss of NASA, Bill Nelson, congratulated SpaceX for having recovered the propellant, emphasizing on “spaceflight does not[étaient] not easy ».

Although rivals, Musk and Bezos congratulate each other

Known for not getting along, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos nevertheless welcomed their respective launches. The founder of Amazon on Thursday wished ” good luck “ to his rival before takeoff, a few hours after the latter rushed to congratulate him “for reaching orbit on the first attempt!” ».

An exchange of pleasantries which is out of place but fits into a context of general rapprochement in the tech world around President-elect Donald Trump: most of the sector’s bosses will attend his inauguration on Monday.

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Elon Musk spent tens of millions of dollars supporting the Republican’s presidential campaign and landed an advisory job in exchange, raising questions about possible conflicts of interest with the government.

Their great rapprochement also raises concerns about possible negative repercussions for the activities of Jeff Bezos.