Astronauts orbiting 250 miles above Earth got a front-row seat to destruction on Thursday.
During a SpaceX flight test of Starship, the world’s most powerful rocket and spacecraft system, NASA‘s Don Pettit snapped photos from the International Space Station of the ship blowing up. The images, which he posted on X, the social platform owned by SpaceX founder and President Donald Trump’s right-hand man Elon Musk, show the astonishing accident from space.
“We saw the Starship 8 breakup in the upper atmosphere and fall back to earth from the ISS,” said Pettit, known for his photography from the lofty perch.
Starship, a 400-foot-tall, super-heavy-lift rocket and spaceship, blasted off shortly after 5:30 p.m. CT on March 6 from the aerospace company’s private spaceport in Boca Chica, Texas. The test flight was the rocket system’s eighth. This is now the second consecutive test, coming off the heels of a mishap in January, in which the ship exploded less than 10 minutes into flight — long before its intended splashdown in the Indian Ocean.
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