The seventh test of SpaceX’s unmanned Starship lit up the sky when it went awry.
After the 403-foot-long megarocket lifted off from a site in southern Texas, the launch tower’s “chopstick arms” successfully caught its returning booster engine.
About eight-and-a-half minutes into the Jan. 16 flight, the upper half of the rocket experienced what the company calls a “RUD”—“rapid unscheduled disassembly.”
Some onlookers captured in videos the moment when a tiny white dot in the sky went supernova before falling to Earth.
A video posted on X showed the fall of debris in multicolored streaks over the Turks and Caicos Islands, a British Overseas Territory east of Cuba....
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