'Catastrophic' SpaceX Starship explosion tore a hole in the atmosphere last year in 1st-of-its-kind event, Russian scientists reveal

The high-altitude explosion of one of SpaceX's supersized Starship rockets last year temporarily ripped a hole in the upper atmosphere, a new study from Russian scientists shows. It is the first time this type of atmospheric disturbance has been created by a human-caused explosion, the researchers say.

On Nov. 18, 2023, SpaceX launched its superheavy Starship rocket — the largest and most powerful rocket ever built — for the second time ever from SpaceX's Starbase test and manufacturing facility in Boca Chica, Texas.

Around 4 minutes after liftoff, the rocket's first stage — the large, lower part that contains the main engines — detached from the upper part of the rocket as planned but unexpectedly exploded shortly afterward, before it could land back on Earth. Then, another 4 minutes later, the rest of the rocket blew up in a larger "rapid unscheduled disassembly" around 93 miles (150 kilometers) above the ground, when a fire started as the rocket vented liquid oxygen. The company's founder and CEO Elon Musk later said that the rocket would have made it to orbit if it had been carrying a proper payload.

In the new study, published Aug. 26 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, researchers revealed that the second explosion temporarily created a large hole in the ionosphere — the part of the atmosphere between 50 and 400 miles (80 and 650 kilometers) above Earth's surface where gases have been ionized, or stripped of electrons, and turned into plasma.

"Usually, such holes are formed as a result of chemical processes in the ionosphere due to interaction with engine fuel," study lead author Yury Yasyukevich, an ionosphere physicist at the Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute of Solar-Terrestrial Physics (ISTP), said in a translated article from the Russian state media site TASS. This is the first known time that an ionospheric hole has been created by a "catastrophic phenomena" such as a human-made explosion, he added.

Multiple satellites and international ground-based stations observed the disturbance, which lasted for 30 to 40 minutes before the affected part of the ionosphere fully recovered, the researchers wrote. The peak size of the hole remains unclear.

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