It was a typical balmy afternoon across the tropical islands that lie southeast of Florida, where tens of thousands of tourists flock this time of year for winter break. But on January 16, just after sundown, a spacecraft erupted into a ball of flames over the North Atlantic Ocean near Turks and Caicos Islands.
The upper stage of a SpaceX Starship launch system, the most powerful rocket ever built, had broken apart minutes after liftoff from South Texas during its seventh test flight, fracturing into a cloud of debris that streaked through the evening sky. Blazing orange and white, the astonishing spectacle left onlookers gazing in awe from beaches and cruise ships — with many posting the bizarre scene to social media.
Were they meteorites? Satellites? The harbingers of the end of the world?
“I just never have seen colors like that in the sky,” said Lori Kaine, a resident of Providenciales, the main island of the Turks and Caicos archipelago. “At first, I thought it was an actual plane that had exploded.”
The noise was deafening, she recalled. Even inside with her doors and windows closed, Kaine said she could still hear the jarring boom. One of her dogs panicked while another could be heard crying outside, she said.
It wasn’t until Kaine checked the flood of messages on her phone that she first came across reports about the failed Starship spacecraft.
The next morning, in the light of day, Kaine said she began to take stock of the fallout.
A mysterious cable had landed in her driveway. Broken hexagon tiles — likely part of Starship’s heat shield — littered the roadway where Kaine typically walks her dogs, she said. The nearby beach was similarly strewn with debris.
“I’m like, ‘OK, this is crazy’ — because (the Starship pieces are) on the inner roads of the island and over on the beach,” Kaine said.
Turks and Caicos, a British territory located 525 miles (925 kilometers) southeast of Miami that includes 40 islands, eight of which are inhabited, appears to be the area that was hardest hit by the falling Starship debris. No injuries resulting from the explosion have been reported, but multiple residents say the rocket parts did land near homes and have washed up along beaches near tourist hot spots. There has been one reported incident of property damage.
SpaceX’s response to the incident has drawn criticism from Turks and Caicos residents. And the ordeal raises broader questions about the company’s approach to developing Starship — the gargantuan rocket system SpaceX hopes will one day carry humans to the moon and Mars — and its decision to launch the vehicle’s test flights out of South Texas, on a path that takes the spacecraft over populated areas.
An ongoing investigation
After the Starship broke apart, the Federal Aviation Administration activated a “Debris Response Area,” which meant the agency briefly locked down airspace near Turks and Caicos. The US agency licenses commercial rocket launches and is overseeing an investigation into the incident.
The DRA alert and resulting flight diversions led to a cascade of travel delays.
Debris has now been found all over the islands, according to a database put together by local environmental group Turks and Caicos Reef Fund in partnership with the government’s Department of Environment and Coastal Resources.
Wreckage has washed up on every beach on Providenciales, as well as “from South Caicos to West Caicos which essentially spans the entirety of the Caicos Banks,” said Alizee Zimmermann, the executive director of the Turks and Caicos Reef Fund, a US-registered nonprofit.
The reports also include at least one instance of property damage: Debris reportedly struck a car in South Caicos, Zimmermann said.
The FAA confirmed to CNN that it is looking into “one report of minor damage to a vehicle located in South Caicos,” though the agency said as of Tuesday afternoon, the report was still unverified. There were no reported injuries or other instances of damage, the agency added.
‘Is this safe?’
Starship is still a work in progress, prone to explosive mishaps.
SpaceX — unlike NASA and some of the company’s competitors in the aerospace industry — embraces a strategy called “rapid iterative development.” The approach emphasizes building prototypes and accepting added risk during test flights, which launch from the company’s Starbase facilities located on Texas’ southernmost tip.
Previous Starship flights have resulted in explosions over the Gulf of Mexico and other areas of the ocean. The vehicle’s first test mission notably blew up a launchpad in South Texas, causing a blizzard of debris and sparking backlash from environmentalists. However, the January 16 test flight stands out because of the Starship’s proximity to populated islands at the time it malfunctioned.
SpaceX maintains that its “rapid iterative development” approach allows engineers to learn and adjust Starship’s design more cheaply and quickly than if it were to rely on more traditional approaches and extensive ground testing.
But the strategy also frequently puts SpaceX in the hot seat when test flights do not go according to plan.
“Just being witnesses to this explosion and actually receiving debris, it makes you question a lot of things too,” Florida resident Elena Zavet, who was visiting Turks and Caicos during the explosion, told CNN affiliate WSVN. “Like is this safe?”
In its statement to CNN, the FAA said that the Turks and Caicos government was made aware prior to the Starship launch that the nation was located within a possible hazard area.
The agency also said that, before the test flight launched, it required SpaceX to map out “hazard areas sufficient to ensure that the probability of casualty to a member of the public on land or on board a maritime vessel does not exceed one in one million.”
“No Caribbean islands, including Turks and Caicos, exceeded this threshold,” the agency said.
‘Unsettling’ finds
In general, Turks and Caicos residents have expressed disappointment in the response from SpaceX.
“I’m into the launches and what (SpaceX CEO Elon) Musk is doing — but I think he should be liable for the cleanup, too,” said Amos Luker, the owner of a car rental business on Providenciales called Scooter Bob’s.
“There’s not been big warnings going out whatsoever,” he added, referring to limited communication about the potentially hazardous nature of the debris.
SpaceX did not share any information about the location of the explosion or how to handle debris on X, where the company’s account has nearly 40 million followers.
The company did say in a statement on its website that people should contact SpaceX if debris is found and refrain from touching the objects. That post also noted that SpaceX believed “surviving pieces of debris would have fallen into the designated hazard area.” (Initially, the statement described debris as falling “into the Atlantic Ocean” — but the language was amended the day after the accident to remove that phrase.)
In the same statement, SpaceX sought to frame the Starship flight as a milestone, saying, “success comes from what we learn, and this flight test will help us improve Starship’s reliability as SpaceX seeks to make life multiplanetary.”
Cynthia Filo, the manager and captain of Silly Creek Water Sports in Providenciales, told CNN she has also found wreckage — a fact that she finds “unsettling for the areas that I found it in, because it’s way up in the pond area.
“So it’s already come in from the ocean and gone miles inland,” Filo said. On Wednesday, she told CNN she discovered a fragment next to her house, which she said she believes may have fallen off the roof days after the incident.
Zimmermann of the Turks and Caicos Reef Fund said she is aware that “a multiagency response is being planned with the key focus on cleanup.” And a recent dispatch from authorities showed that local officials met with several members of the Air Accidents Investigation Branch, an arm of the United Kingdom’s Department for Transport, last week.
But residents are still waiting for something to be done. “We’re just trying to put forward a plea to at least help assist us in financing the cleanup that’s being done through volunteers,” Zimmermann added.
Growing frustration
Kaine, who lives on Providenciales, said she began to collect detritus from Starship the day after the January 16 explosion.
The objects she gathered left her hands covered in soot and grime. She estimated there are now “easily 200 pounds (91 kilograms)” of debris in her collection, stashed away in garbage bags labeled with the location where she picked up the debris. Plenty more still litters the beaches, she said.
But it was not until the day after the explosion, on January 17, that Kaine became aware that interacting with the debris could be dangerous.
The Turks and Caicos National Security Secretariat posted a notice to Facebook, saying the government is “not aware of any specific risks” — but “space objects can sometimes contain hazardous materials which can cause serious harm to health.”
The notice recommended residents not touch the debris and to contact the Turks and Caicos Islands (TCI) government or SpaceX.
Kaine said she grew frustrated.
For one, it was over 24 hours before she learned that exposure to the materials could be dangerous.
She also worried that the debris, left alone, would soon be covered by sand — literally burying the fallout from SpaceX’s explosive mishap and perhaps further threatening the ecology of the island.
SpaceX also took a week to respond to a voicemail she left with the company’s hotline, Kaine told CNN. And even then, she was told representatives from the company would not arrive for another few days.
“There’s not going to be a problem finding debris when they get here,” Kaine said of SpaceX. “If they want me to find it, I can find it.”
According to a January 23 Facebook update from the local government, SpaceX representatives were scheduled to be on the island that day. Neither the company nor the government responded to requests for comment.
Kaine said she still has the debris stored at her home.
Potential hazard to health
Hours after sending out its first communication on January 17, the day after the explosion, the TCI National Security Secretariat issued another dispatch, saying “initial discussions between the UK Space Agency and SpaceX” have “confirmed that no Hydrazine was on board the Starship rocket.”
Hydrazine is a type of propellant used on some spacecraft that can cause nausea, vomiting, inflammation of the nerves and even a coma following exposure.
SpaceX’s Starship does not use such fuels. The megarocket instead relies on liquid methane and oxygen for propellant — but “any kind of fuel is going to … have a bunch of chemical energy inside it,” according to Marlon Sorge, the executive director of the Center for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies at The Aerospace Corporation, a federally funded research center.
“Even if it isn’t as dangerous as hydrazine, where you touch it or get close to it and you’re in trouble — it’s still volatile, like gasoline,” Sorge added. “And there are other things on board spacecraft, like batteries.”
He added that it is possible for entire rocket fuel tanks to survive the trip down to the ground: “If they’re weakened, you touch them, they blow up.”
That’s likely why local authorities advised residents not to touch any debris “out of an abundance of caution,” as the Turks and Caicos government wrote in a January 17 notice.
“It’s not that it’s a death sentence to get close to one of these things,” Sorge said. “Mostly they’re probably OK, but it is potentially risky. And it’s not worth people getting injured.”
But many people who came across the detritus have started to collect the objects — some individuals took them home as souvenirs, while others are aiming to sell them for profit.
One eBay listing for a heat shield tile allegedly recovered from Turks and Caicos has a bid for $3,000. A look at previously sold remnants of destroyed Starship spacecraft show the items have fetched up to $2,000.
But selling or keeping a piece of a SpaceX craft could be legally questionable, Sorge noted. According to the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, “technically, (the debris) still belongs to the launching organization.”
Environmental impact
Zimmermann said on Monday that, although cleanup efforts may be underway soon, she is not aware of concrete plans to evaluate the Starship explosion’s environmental footprint.
She added that she hopes there will be a formal assessment that would include testing the waters for signs of contamination and conducting exploratory surveys that might use drones to hunt for large pieces of debris at sea, which could be impacting sensitive ecosystems.
“But all that requires a lot of coordination and a fair amount of funding — and both of those are limited here,” Zimmermann said.
“It’s not been the best response,” she added. “I think there’s not a lot of precedent for this type of event either in such a populated area. But there’s debris as small as a third of a fingernail and as large as a car scattered around.”
Kaine said she’s grown wary of SpaceX’s response to the ordeal and the Starship program in general. She said she’s not interested in keeping any of the debris she collected. Her goal is to keep the roadways and beaches she frequents clean and free of dangerous materials.
“You need to come pick this up,” Kaine said of SpaceX. “And my concern has grown on a larger level about these launches, because now that I’m reading about it — there’s such limited information out there.”
