Shocking images show Elon Musk’s doomed Starship rocket spray debris over Texas coast

Shocking videos posted online show Elon Musk’s doomed Starship missile spraying debris over the southern Texas coast.

The massive 395-foot rocket launched into the sky Thursday morning in sunny Boca Chica, Texas, but burst into flames just four minutes after liftoff.

The blast sent debris flying at thousands of miles per hour, damaging a car parked miles away and sending a cloud of dust over the Gulf of Mexico on an otherwise sunny day.

Images from thousands of feet away show the cloud of dust slowly engulfing the area, flying debris and palm trees swaying in the high winds before finally beginning to dissipate.

Photos also showed the colossal crater and wrecked launchpad left in the rocket’s wake.

The Federal Aviation Administration has now grounded all of SpaceX’s Starship rockets as it investigates the launch failure.

Thursday’s explosion occurred when the rocket failed to detach over the Gulf of Mexico, forcing SpaceX bosses to destroy it.

The mission was to watch the craft rocket 150 miles into the atmosphere before sailing for an hour and crashing into the Pacific Ocean.

The rocket took off promisingly as Starship ignited its 33 Raptor engines and lifted off the launch pad at 1,242 miles per hour.

It reached an altitude of about 40 kilometers above Earth when it had to separate so that the booster would fall back to Earth and into the Gulf of Mexico.

But the separation failed, causing the rocket to spin and within seconds the rocket exploded over the ocean.

The FAA is now investigating the crash to ensure that “any system, process or procedure does not affect public safety,” as is standard operating procedure, officials said.

Still, SpaceX CEO Musk had warned that such an outcome could happen during Thursday’s test flight, suggesting that the launch’s main goal was to clear the launchpad – which the spacecraft successfully completed.

And during Thursday’s launch live stream, SpaceX Principal Integration Engineer John Insprucker reminded the crowd that “this was a development test.”

“It’s Starship’s first test flight,” he said. And the goal is to collect the data and, as we said, clear the block and get it ready to go again.

So you never quite know what’s going to happen. But as we promised, thrills are guaranteed. And Starship gave us quite a spectacular ending to what has been a really incredible test so far.”

In fact, the company considers the launch a success, despite what they categorized as “a quick unplanned teardown.”

“We cleared the tower, which was our only hope,” Kate Tice, a SpaceX quality systems engineer, said during the live-streamed event.

“With a test like this, success comes from what we learn, and today’s test will help us improve the reliability of Starship as SpaceX tries to make life multi-planetary,” SpaceX tweeted.

Musk also tweeted, “Congratulations @SpaceX team on an exciting Starship test launch! Learned a lot for the next test launch in a few months.’

The rocket is designed to be larger and more powerful than others of its kind, capable of delivering more than 100 tons into orbit.

It generates 17 million pounds of thrust, more than twice as much as the Saturn V rockets used to send Apollo astronauts to the moon.

The idea is that the Starship would be able to take humans to Mars in the first step of Musk’s larger vision of making the human race a ‘multi-planetary species’.

He would eventually like to establish a human colony on Mars and build cities on the Red Planet.

If those efforts prove successful, Musk plans to use the rockets to deliver humans to destinations in the “greater solar system,” including gas giants like Jupiter or one of its potentially habitable moons in the event of an apocalypse.

But the explosion has left some elected officials wondering if there is a need for more commercial space regulation.

Garrett Graves, chairman of the House Transportation Subcommittee on Aviation, a Republican from Louisiana, has said he doesn’t want to do anything that hinders the progress of innovation for commercial space.

“But of course you have to balance that with safety,” he said Politics. “And so we’re moving on to the National Transportation Safety Board.”

Tammy Duckworth, the chair of the Senate Aviation Subcommittee, meanwhile, said lawmakers need to clarify which agency will be responsible for regulating the space tourism industry.

“We have to decide who is going to regulate that kind of travel,” she said. “Will it be the FAA or will it be NASA?”

However, she noted that “NASA is not a regulatory body like FAA is – making up the rules and policies for how we operate both commercial passenger and commercial cargo travel.”

“We need to sit down and weigh up who’s going to be in charge of this — an agency with a lot of experience, or a space agency that doesn’t have experience moving things logistically like the FAA does,” Duckworth said. “So we’ll have to see.”