Science | Whoopsie, SpaceX Blew Up Two Rockets and Punched a Massive Hole in One of Earth's Layers

By Hālau ʻĀha Hūi Lanakila on September 5, 2024

spacex's starship spacecraft and super heavy rocket

In mid-November 2023, a disastrous SpaceX launch, which saw the explosion of not one but two rockets, offered a rare opportunity to study the effects of such phenomena on the ionosphere.
A study by Russian scientists revealed how this explosion temporarily blew open a hole in the ionosphere stretching from the Yucatan to the southeastern U.S.
Although far from the first rocket-induced disturbance in the ionosphere, this is one of the first explosive events in the ionosphere to be extensively studied.

November 18, 2023, wasn't a great day for the commercial spaceflight company SpaceX. While testing its stainless steel-clad Starship, designed to be the company's chariot to Mars, the spacecraft exploded four minutes after liftoff over the skies of Boca Chica, Texas.

Filling a metal candle with more than a thousand tons of propellant and flinging it into outer space has always run its fair share of risks (and explosions), but this particular event—occurring around 93 miles above the Earth's surface—allowed scientists to closely study one poorly understood aspect of human spaceflight: What damage do rockets inflict on the Earth's all-too-important ionosphere?

Lying at the edge of the planet's atmosphere and outer space some 50 to 400 miles above the surface, the ionosphere is a sea of electrically charged particles vital to global radio and GPS technologies as well as protecting us from harmful solar rays. Because of its important role in the everyday function of modern society, scientists are eager to understand how disturbances in the ionosphere can impact life on Earth, and that's why team of researchers from institutes and universities in Russia and France analyzed the explosion of the tallest and most powerful rocket ever built. The results were published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Although bad news for SpaceX, the explosion oddly presented a rare opportunity to study aspects of the ionosphere that would, under normal conditions, be too weak to detect.

Source: Popular Mechanics