When people wonder why their flight is delayed, perhaps the last thing on their mind is Elon Musk. But his exploding space rockets are causing chaos in the skies, Australian airline Qantas has complained.
The latest problem came when yet another of Musk’s SpaceX Starship test flights exploded on 16 January 2025, with debris crashing towards a splashdown zone in the southern Indian Ocean and outside of “protected areas”. The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has now placed a temporary halt on the SpaceX trials.
Fire in the aft
From Texas, USA, SpaceX was again attempting to launch, re-catch and demonstrate the uncrewed Starship but, the firm said, “telemetry was lost with the vehicle after approximately eight and a half minutes of flight”. A fire in the rear of the rocket resulted in its “rapid unscheduled disassembly” – in other words, an explosion.
SpaceX Starship Ship 33 broke up over Turks and Caicos ->The Caribbean Sea
— The World Ranking (@worldranking_) January 17, 2025
Debris seen over the Caribbean after SpaceX's Starship explodes during a test flight…
SpaceX's Starship RUD seen from an aeroplane#ElonMusk pic.twitter.com/JobgZEjDdm
The FAA issues warnings to air missions about spacecraft activity that could result in danger to commercial flights, including updates when things go wrong and debris might fall into unexpected areas.
Weeks of delays to passenger aircraft
These alerts have reportedly disrupted schedules for normal aviation for weeks on end. Qantas has been forced to postpone multiple passenger flights, it says, causing delays of up to six hours at a time for its customers, all because the timing and location of SpaceX rocket re-entry keeps chopping and changing.
In remarks to Reuters, Ben Holland, the head of Qantas operations revealed frustration when describing how the “late notice” is preventing the airline giving flyers advance information. Qantas has now asked SpaceX to “refine the areas and time windows for the rocket re-entries to minimize future disruption,” he said.
Thousands of air passengers inconvenienced
The failed SpaceX mission also resulted in other delays and diversions around the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico. A Simple Flying analysis of Flightradar24 data shows an American Airlines flight had to divert from Puerto Rico to Orlando, with passengers suffering a delay of more than two hours as a result. A JetBlue flight to the Dominican Republic was also diverted, to the Bahamas; a Delta Air Lines flight to Atlanta, Georgia had to stop off at Miami before continuing; and a United Airlines flight had to fly around an area northeast of the Turks and Caicos Islands, due to Musk’s mission.
@italiankate @American Airlines #americanairlines #flight #flightdelay #customerservice ♬ original sound – italiankate
Alongside Qantas, that adds up to thousands of travellers inconvenienced thanks to the SpaceX explosion, as well as extra aviation fuel used unnecessarily. And the Starship experiments are not the only issue. Simple Flying also found a correlation between Musk’s Falcon 9 missions and other flight diversions and delays.
Space junk worldwide
Often credited as being “reusable”, in fact, only the first Falcon 9 stages are used again, while a 3.5-tonne section remains in orbit and doesn’t always burn up on re-entry to the Earth’s atmosphere. Critics have also pointed out that Musk’s rockets are incredibly heavy and launches have spread particulates and damage over vast areas.
While space junk is not new, SpaceX’s “fail fast, fail often” mantra, which sees explosions incite whoops of celebration among staff, could be argued to be the reason why so much of its waste has been found all over Earth, from the UK’s Scilly Isles to North Carolina and Washington in the US, to New South Wales, Australia. With any luck, however, and continued FAA intervention, the rocket parts will continue to miss passenger aircraft on their way down.
