Exploded SpaceX rocket devastated a town and a wildlife reserve

Exploded SpaceX rocket devastated a town and a wildlife reserve
salon.com

Aside: by chance I happened to be in the area so headed down and saw the launch. That was a trip.

A guy I chatted with told me we were 5 miles from the launch. He said that 10 miles is the typical viewing distance for the Florida launches. NASA apparently, he said, has an observing facility that is 3.5 miles from the Florida tower but you pay dearly for a seat.

With that as context, I confess that I was expecting something a little more chest-pounding from the launch. Perhaps 3.5 miles packs that extra punch.

The slowness with which it climbed also surprised me. Watching it rise, kind of hanging in the air it seemed to struggle. It seemed suddenly to me that large rockets were "not meant to be", were an affront to gravity or something.

We saw several of these flashes in the thrust that apparently were engines going out (blowing up?). At the time I thought maybe the fuel was being pumped unevenly — some kind of pogo-ing. When nothing blew up though I assumed that perhaps at various angles the flame from the motors might just look brighter — perhaps momentarily unobstructed by exhaust.

As it disappeared into the sky above the final thing that struck me was how long you could continue to hear the thing — like a Harley or something still thundering long after you've lost sight of it.

If it blew up while we were there, I didn't know it. Odd flashes and booms had suddenly become something I just came to expect from a large rocket launch. We were frankly more interested in getting off South Padre before the whole crowd slowed traffic to a crawl.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enB2QL9Ulus

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGLfs376wXE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnMM1lObp0Y

The "damage" is almost exclusively to and from the concrete pad being blown apart by the rocket plume into fast moving chunks and dust. The chunks did not devastate any of the town. The wildlife reserve was similarly not devastated. The worst "damage" to non-SpaceX property was the spread of concrete bits and sand.

I have plenty of complaints about him but the non stop articles have just become comical at this point.