SpaceX rocket explosion shredded the upper atmosphere

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.

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2024GL10...

A bit of a click-baitey title from nature.com. The word 'shredded' doesn't appear in the research. 'Shredding' is what you do with paper and skateboards, not the ionosphere.

Just because we don’t like Elon Musk’s politics, doesn’t mean we have to start attacking space travel