"Huge ball of fire": SpaceX Starship explodes again, sending debris across skies

SpaceX’s eighth test flight of its Starship rocket ended in a late-stage explosion Thursday night, leaving a barrage of blazing shrapnel visible in the skies that disrupted air traffic.

“Everything looked normal. And then it maybe got about 20 degrees above the horizon and, you know, turned into a huge ball of fire. And so we knew right away that it had exploded," Bret Bostwick, who was on his boat with his family, said.

The explosion marks the second unsuccessful launch for Elon Musk’s space technology company this year, after the same vessel malfunctioned on Jan. 16 due to an unexpected misfiring about eight minutes into the launch.