Elon Musk’s SpaceX Starship which exploded only minutes after takeoff disrupted hundreds of plane flights as the US is still grappling with a spate of aviation disasters.
The rocket sent debris flying from Texas where it launched, to as far as the Turks and Caicos Islands in the Caribbean, and interrupted around 240 flights, according to the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on Friday.
Specifically, the Starship failure on Thursday caused 171 delays in departure averaging 28 minutes, 28 diversions, and 40 planes to hold in the air for 22 minutes on average with the FAA’s Debris Responsive Area active.
The federal agency also issued ground stops spanning more than an hour at Miami International Airport, Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport, Palm Beach International Airport and Orlando International Airport in Florida.
No one was injured in what was SpaceX’s second test launch explosion within just over a month. Starship’s seventh test flight exploded on January 16 and littered Turks and Caicos with debris.
SpaceX owner Musk, who has been spending much of his time at the White House leading the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency, said the explosion on Thursday was ‘a minor setback’.
‘The next ship will be ready in 4 to 6 weeks,’ wrote Musk on his X (formerly Twitter) platform, adding that ‘progress is measured by time’.
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Shortly after the Thursday mishap, the FAA called on SpaceX to investigate why the unmanned spaceship imploded. The 123m rocket was supposed to make its way back into the Earth’s orbit after one hour.
Starship is a critical component in Musk’s mission to have humans land on Mars.
The explosion and resulting disruptions to flights happened just over a month after an American Airlines regional jet and a Black Hawk helicopter collided mid-air and resulted in the worst aviation disaster in the US since 2001. Numerous small plane crashes across the US recently also have Americans nervous about air travel.
A few hundred FAA employees reportedly received termination notices in mid-February from an ‘exec order’ Microsoft email after President Donald Trump vowed to fire air traffic controllers who are not mentally competent for the job.
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