{"id":923709,"date":"2026-10-11T01:56:10","date_gmt":"2026-10-11T01:56:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/923709\/"},"modified":"2026-10-11T01:56:10","modified_gmt":"2026-10-11T01:56:10","slug":"spacex-needed-tourist-videos-to-track-rocket-debris","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/923709\/","title":{"rendered":"SpaceX Needed Tourist Videos to Track Rocket Debris"},"content":{"rendered":"


\n When SpaceX’s Starship blew apart over the Caribbean last year, some of the most useful tracking tools weren’t high-end sensors but vacationers’ phones, ProPublica<\/a> reports. A “mishap report” that SpaceX submitted to the Federal Aviation Administration shows the company leaned on videos shot from Disney and Royal Caribbean cruise ships, a Club Med resort, and even commercial flights to reconstruct how chunks of the rocket streaked across the sky and fell to Earth. One FAA document notes debris “transiting behind the cruise ship” at 1:42 after liftoff, with mapped camera locations helping SpaceX fill in gaps in its own data. The footage may have been a resourceful way to reconstruct the explosion, but it also raises questions about the limits of SpaceX’s own tracking data. \n <\/p>\n


\n “I would read it as evidence their own tracking did not carry cleanly through the debris cloud phase, so they used the public to fill the gap,” Moriba Jah, a professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, tells the outlet. SpaceX, it seems, didn’t have a full picture of where the debris landed without the extra videos. All of the above matters because Starship’s seventh and eighth test flights both failed over busy air corridors, prompting the FAA to significantly increase the airspace it blocks off before launches. The agency heavily redacted the SpaceX mishap reports it released under a Freedom of Information Act request, including debris-location estimates. The secrecy makes it difficult to gauge how close airline passengers came to falling debris\u2014or whether safety margins are keeping pace with SpaceX’s aggressive launch schedule. Read the full story<\/a>. \n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When SpaceX’s Starship blew apart over the Caribbean last year, some of the most useful tracking tools…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":923710,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[8170,64,63,10404,114127,437,15188,128,285,5437,28179,14855],"class_list":["post-923709","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-airlines","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-caribbean","tag-debris","tag-disney","tag-faa","tag-science","tag-space","tag-spacex","tag-starship","tag-videos"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/923709","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=923709"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/923709\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/923710"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=923709"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=923709"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=923709"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}