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

• SpaceX’s Starship rocket burst into flames just four minutes after takeoff in Texas on Thursday
• Footage shows a cloud of dust slowly engulfing the area, sending debris flying and palm trees swaying in the strong winds
• Images also showed the colossal crater and destroyed launch pad left in the rocket’s wake

Shocking videos posted online show Elon Musk‘s Starship rocket sprays debris all over the southern part Texas coast when it shut down the launch pad.

The massive 395-foot rocket was propelled into the air from sunny Boca Chica, Texas Thursday morning, but burst into flames just four minutes after takeoff.

The explosion sent debris flying thousands of miles per hour, damaged a car parked miles away and sent a cloud of dust over the Gulf of Mexico an otherwise sunny day.

Footage from thousands of feet away shows the dust cloud slowly engulfing the area, sending debris flying and sending palm trees swaying in the strong winds before finally dissipating.

Images also showed the colossal crater and destroyed launch pad left in the rocket’s wake.

The Federal Aviation Administration has now grounded all of SpaceX’s Starship rockets as they investigate the failed launch.

The explosion on Thursday happened when the rocket failed to separate over the Gulf of Mexico, prompting SpaceX bosses to destroy it.

Its mission was supposed to see the craft blast 150 miles high into the atmosphere before cruising for an hour and crashing in the Pacific Ocean.

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

It reached an altitude of about 25 miles above Earth when it was supposed 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 detonated over the ocean.

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

Still, SpaceX CEO Musk had warned that such an outcome could happen during Thursday’s test flight, suggesting the main goal of the launch was to clear the launch pad — which Starship successfully accomplished.

And during the company’s livestream of the launch Thursday, SpaceX Principal Integration Engineer John Insprucker reminded the audience that “this was a development test.”

“It’s a first test flight of the Starship,” he said. “And the goal is to gather data and, as we said, clear the slate and get ready to go again.

So you never know exactly what will happen. But as we promised, excitement is guaranteed. And Starship gave us a pretty spectacular finish to what was really an 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 Starship reliability as SpaceX tries to make life multiplanetary,” SpaceX tweeted.

Musk also tweeted: “Congratulations @SpaceX team on an exciting test launch of Starship! 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, and can lift more than 100 tons into orbit.

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

The idea is that Starship could bring humans to Mars in the first step of Musk’s larger vision of creating humanity a ‘multiplanetary species.’

He would eventually like to start a human colony on Mars and build cities on the red planet.

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

But the explosion has caused some elected officials to question whether there is a need for more commercial spaceflight regulation.

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

“But of course you have to balance that with safety,” he said Politico. “And so we will continue to work with the National Transportation Safety Board.”

Tammy Duckworth, chair of the Senate Commerce 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. “Is it going to be the FAA or is it going to be NASA?”

She noted, however, that “NASA is not a regulatory agency like the FAA is — coming up with rules and policies for how we conduct both commercial passenger and commercial cargo travel.”

“We need to sit down and come together on who is going to be in charge of this — an agency that has a lot of experience, or a space agency that has no experience in logistically moving things around the way the FAA does,” said Duckworth. So we’ll see.