NEWS
30 August 2024

Huge SpaceX rocket explosion shredded the upper atmosphere

Observations highlight threats to GPS and similar systems from natural as well as human-caused disturbances.

By Davide Castelvecchi

The huge explosions that destroyed SpaceX’s Starship mega-rocket last year also blew one of the biggest ‘holes’ ever detected in the ionosphere, a layer of thin air in the upper atmosphere. The hole stretched for thousands of kilometres and persisted for nearly an hour, a study found1.

Study co-author Yury Yasyukevich, an atmospheric physicist at the Institute of Solar‐Terrestrial Physics in Irkutsk, Russia, says that the extent of the disturbance took his team by surprise: “It means we don’t understand processes which take place in the atmosphere.” He adds that such phenomena could have implications for future autonomous vehicles that might require precision satellite navigation. The results were published on 26 August in Geophysical Research Letters.

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Neutralizing the air

The team examined publicly available data from more than 2,500 ground stations across North America and the Caribbean that receive satellite navigation signals. They found that the Starship explosions produced shock waves that travelled faster than the speed of sound, turning the ionosphere into a region of neutral atmosphere — a “hole” — for nearly an hour over a region stretching from Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula to the southeastern United States. Rocket exhaust can trigger chemical reactions that produce temporary holes in the ionosphere even in the absence of an explosion, but in this case the shockwaves themselves had by far the larger effect, Yasyukevich says.

“I was impressed by this case study,” says Kosuke Heki, a geophysicist at Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan, who was an open reviewer for the paper. But he thinks that the chemical effects of the large conflagration were the dominant cause of the hole.

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Geophysical Research LettersVolume 51, Issue 16 e2024GL109284
Research Letter
Open Access

Supersonic Waves Generated by the 18 November 2023 Starship Flight and Explosions: Unexpected Northward Propagation and a Man-Made Non-chemical Depletion

Y. V. Yasyukevich, A. M. Vesnin, E. Astafyeva, B. M. Maletckii, V. P. Lebedev, A. M. Padokhin

First published: 26 August 2024
https://doi.org/10.1029/2024GL109284

Abstract
On 18 November 2023, SpaceX launched the Starship, the tallest and the most powerful rocket ever built. The Super Heavy engine separated from the Starship spacecraft and exploded at 90 km of altitude, while the main core Starship continued to rise up to 149 km and exploded after ∼8 min of flight. In this work, we used data from ground-based GNSS receivers and we analyzed total electron content (TEC) response to the Starship flight and the two explosions. For the first time, we observed large-distance northward propagation of intensive 2,000 km V-shaped ionospheric disturbances from the rocket trajectory. The observed perturbations, most likely, represent shock waves propagating with the cone angle of ∼14° on the North and ∼7° on the South against the flight track that corresponds to the Mach angle of the shock waves in the lower atmosphere. The Starship explosion also produced a non-chemical depletion in the ionospheric TEC.

Key Points

- The 18 November 2023 Starship flight and explosions generated large-scale multi-oscillation supersonic conic waves in the ionosphere

- The cone angle of the V-shaped ionospheric disturbances corresponds to the Mach angle of shock waves propagating in the lower ionosphere

- The shock waves from the Starship explosion caused a depletion in total electron content (TEC)

Plain Language Summary
On 18 November 2023, SpaceX launched the Starship, the tallest and the most powerful rocket ever built. About 2 min and 40 s after the liftoff, the Super Heavy engine separated from the Starship spacecraft and exploded at an altitude of 90 km. The main core Starship continued to rise to 149 km and exploded as well. The rocket launch and explosion produced an unexpected response in the ionosphere—the ionized part of the Earth's atmosphere. The Starship flew at a velocity, exceeding the local sound speed, and generated cone-like atmospheric shock-acoustic waves. Most unexpectedly, the observed disturbances represented long and intensive multi-oscillation wave structures that propagated northward, which is unusual for disturbances driven by a rocket launch. The Starship explosion also generated a large-amplitude total electron content depletion that could have been reinforced by the impact of the spacecraft's fuel exhaust in the lower atmosphere. This study appears to be the first-time detection of a non-chemical ionospheric hole produced by a man-made explosion.

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