April 21, 2023
The SpaceX rocket launch kicked up debris that damaged an unoccupied car near the blast site and produced a dust cloud that covered Port Isabel, Texas, in grime about six miles away.Abraham Pineda-Jacome/EPA, via Shutterstock
As the most powerful rocket ever built blasted from its launchpad in Boca Chica, Texas, on Thursday, the liftoff rocked the earth and kicked up a billowing cloud of dust and debris, shaking homes and raining down brown grime for miles.
In Port Isabel, a city about six miles northwest where at least one window shattered, residents were alarmed.
“It was truly terrifying,” said Sharon Almaguer, who, at the time of the launch, was at home with her 80-year-old mother. During previous launches, Ms. Almaguer said she had experienced some shaking inside the brick house, but “this was on a completely different level.”
Meanwhile, SpaceX’s Starship
explodedminutes after liftoff and before reaching orbit. Near the launch site, the residents of Port Isabel, known for its
towering lighthouse and less than 10 miles from the border with Mexico, were left to deal with the mess.
Virtually everywhere in the city “ended up with a covering of a rather thick, granular, sand grain that just landed on everything,” Valerie Bates, a Port Isabel spokeswoman, said in an interview.
Images posted to social media showed
residents’ cars covered in brown debris.
A window shattered at a fitness gym, its owner, Luis Alanis, said. Mr. Alanis, who was at home at the time of the launch, said he felt “rumbling, kind of like a mini earthquake.” He estimated that the window would cost about $300 to fix….
“There were bowling ball-sized pieces of concrete that came flying out of the launchpad area,” Mr. Balderas said. The blast, he added, had created a crater that he estimated was around 25 feet deep.
Eric Roesch, an expert in environmental compliance and risk assessment who has been tracking SpaceX’s rocket launches, said in an interview that he and others had long
warned of the environmental risks to the surrounding region. But without a chemical analysis of the dust and debris, he added, it was difficult to say whether or not they were harmful to human health….
Mr. Roesch, who runs the environmental policy blog
ESG Hound, said he believed the dust and debris came largely from a giant crater formed during the rocket’s liftoff. Normally, major launch sites are engineered with a trench or
water system that helps to divert the rocket’s flame away from the ground and to dampen the impact, he said.
“They didn’t do that,” he said. “It appears they just went ahead and just launched this thing.”