The second attempt to launch Starship was more successful than the first but resulted in the explosion of the ship and the first stage. While SpaceX itself stated that the ship was lost and its fate was unknown, the explosion of the Super Heavy accelerator was recorded in full detail. It turned out that the shots of the ship’s last minutes were taken by an amateur astronomer hundreds of kilometers from the starting point. This became the world’s only video evidence of a Starship entering space.

During the second launch attempt of SpaceX’s 122-meter Starship rocket on November 18, all eyes were on it from the launch site near the village of Boca Chica. Amateur astronomer Scott Ferguson (Scott Ferguson) decided to shoot the rocket from the other end of the Gulf of Mexico from the Florida town of Islamorada. And it turned out that he was the only one who could do this until the last minutes of the ship’s flight.

A few years ago, Ferguson began tracking missiles launched from Cape Canaveral. He did this with his 11 inch telescope. A specially written program and data on flight trajectories from websites made it possible to accurately aim and track the flight of missiles. Additionally, the amateur was preparing to film the Starship launches, although he was unable to film the first launch. Then the rocket never rose above the horizon. In any case, the earth is round and he was seven hundred kilometers away from the launch site.

On the second attempt, the telescope was only able to capture the rocket after the destruction was triggered. The reference point was the cloud cover after the explosion. Only later it was possible to shoot a video of the uncontrolled flight of the remains of the Starship – the “winged” nose part with fuel jets from the broken part.

The shots were carried out to an altitude of approximately 150 km, which is above the limit of conventional space. Officially, the Starship has set out for space, albeit in a much abbreviated form. SpaceX company bought the video he made from an amateur. No statement will be superfluous to assess the disaster. You can see footage of this event above.