When SpaceX’s giant Starship rocket exploded over the Caribbean last year, the internet lit up with videos from airline passengers, island tourists and locals showing flaming debris shooting across the sky. Even some airline pilots recorded the fiery aftermath as planes scrambled to move out of its path.

Some of those videos of Starship’s seventh test flight — including ones taken from Disney and Royal Caribbean cruise ships and a Club Med resort — went on to play a role in the company’s efforts to count and track pieces of debris after the explosion, a report obtained by ProPublica says.

The report — obtained by ProPublica from the Federal Aviation Administration through a freedom of information request — shows video captured a fireball, then a shower of sparkling debris in the sky moments after the explosion. It includes maps pinpointing where the images were shot, which helped the company understand how debris tumbled to earth after the blast.

“At 1 minute 42 seconds, the debris cloud is observed transiting behind the cruise ship,” says the report, which SpaceX provided the FAA two weeks after the so-called mishap.

Such reports are required by federal rules in the days after a rocket failure and are supposed to describe what happened and where hazardous debris landed. The information is key for the FAA’s efforts to keep busy air traffic corridors safe at a time of rapid growth in the commercial space industry as companies like SpaceX develop and test rockets that they hope will eventually reach the moon and Mars.

During launches, the FAA preventively closes airspace. It has also been forced to clear areas quickly after test flights of massive spacecraft went wrong.

Starship flights 7 and 8 broke apart last year and scattered debris above airline traffic over the Caribbean. Before Flight 9, the FAA moved to greatly increase the size of the airspace it walled off pre-launch.

The agency defined its no-fly zones, which are closed to airplane traffic during a launch, and its so-called debris response areas, which are closed after a mishap, using information from SpaceX and modeling from Space Force, the branch of the military that deals with the nation’s space interests, to predict where debris might fall.

Nearly doubling those pre-launch no-fly zones “only makes sense if the prior margin was judged inadequate rather than just unlucky,” said Moriba Jah, a professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Texas at Austin.

Earlier this year, the FAA issued a warning that rocket launches could “significantly reduce safety” for airplanes, after ProPublica reported that 21 planes appeared to make sudden turns to exit or avoid an FAA-designated emergency no-fly zone in the minutes after the Flight 7 explosion. Such disruptions are likely to become more frequent. SpaceX is seeking to launch Starship up to 76 times a year from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

The FAA provided ProPublica the reports on Starship flights 7, 8 and 9 — all of which involved mishaps — after we requested them under the Freedom of Information Act. The FAA redacted the vast majority of all three reports, citing, among other things, exemptions in the law that protect confidential business information from disclosure. The blackouts were, in part, a reflection of SpaceX’s objections; FAA allowed the company to challenge the release of information it deemed proprietary.

The FAA refused to release information that would show SpaceX’s estimates of where debris fell during the three rocket failures. It’s unclear what the agency or the company knows about how close any airplanes came to falling debris.

“Withholding the underlying debris estimates makes it impossible for anyone outside SpaceX and FAA to check whether that pattern is improving or repeating,” Jah said. “Given a regulator already revised its own safety margins once, the public has a real interest in seeing the data behind both the old margin and the new one.”

The unredacted part of the report did not show whether the debris from the Flight 7 explosion fell where SpaceX and the FAA expected it to. But the references to Disney and Club Med guests’ video suggest SpaceX did not have a full picture of where the debris landed without them. “I would read it as evidence their own tracking did not carry cleanly through the debris cloud phase, so they used the public to fill the gap,” Jah said.

SpaceX did not respond to requests for comment. The company has said that it learns from its mistakes and that each test improves Starship’s reliability. Last December, it said on X that “SpaceX is committed to responsibly using airspace during launches and reentries, prioritizing public safety to protect people on the ground, at sea, and in the air.”

The FAA did not respond to a request for comment, nor did Disney, Royal Caribbean or Club Med.

Ron Madler, a professor of aerospace engineering at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, said the videos could help SpaceX “either confirm their breakup models or possibly to improve them.”

The mishap report for Flight 8, which rained debris near the Bahamas, said before that flight’s explosive failure, SpaceX did not have the proper “test stand” that was capable of testing the rocket’s engines “for a full Starship mission.” The remainder of the page was blacked out, so it was unclear from the report whether the company had found another way to fully test the engines before launch. 

Flights 7 and 8 both involved the same model. Both ended in engine-related failures.

Text in the report around the statement about the test stand was redacted. But Jah said it “means some part of the engine’s actual flight behavior was being verified for the first time in flight rather than on the ground.”

John Crassidis, an aerospace engineering professor at the University at Buffalo, said launching before having a fully capable test stand was likely “a cost-saving decision.” In building rockets, he said, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has used both the old approach of launching and then fixing any issues that arise, and the newer approach of running simulations and ground tests first to head off problems.

“Doing too much of the old school can lead to too many mishaps and cost overruns,” he said. “Doing too much of the new school leads to long times to get things done and a reduction in flexibility.”

The post Club Med, a Disney Cruise and an Exploding Starship: SpaceX Used Bystander Videos to Track Falling Debris appeared first on ProPublica.

The nation’s largest professional group of pediatricians has renewed its call for a nationwide ban on the sale and distribution of unpasteurized milk and other raw dairy products, according to a policy statement it published earlier this week. 

The revised guidance from the American Academy of Pediatrics warns of the serious health risks from consuming raw dairy products, particularly for children, as well as pregnant and immunocompromised people.

“More and more people are discussing this as a potentially healthful thing to do, when in fact it’s a highly risky thing to do,” said the academy’s president, Dr. Andrew Racine. “So our responsibility, as the leading voice of pediatric healthcare in the United States that’s dedicated to the health and well-being of children, is to make sure that the accurate, evidence-based information is out there.”

The revised statement follows ProPublica reporting that dived deep into the causes and severe consequences of America’s current fascination with raw milk, which has not been heated to kill off harmful bacteria. Once limited to the fringes of health-food culture, unpasteurized milk has morphed into a widespread movement rooted in wellness trends and institutional distrust.  Today, more than 10 million Americans drink it. 

Most scientists and health experts agree that raw milk has no significant, proven nutritional benefits over its pasteurized counterpart and that it cannot treat or cure any disease. It also subjects its consumers to over 100 times the risk of foodborne illness, which can be especially dangerous for young children. Before milk pasteurization was widely adopted a century ago, thousands of children died each year from diseases linked to contaminated dairy. 

As it has grown in popularity in recent years, raw dairy products have contributed to numerous outbreaks of pathogenic diseases, such as salmonella and E. coli. Over the past two years, nine states have experienced outbreaks that regulators have linked to raw dairy. Just last month, federal regulators linked an E. coli outbreak to unpasteurized cheese. Thirteen people fell ill, more than half of whom were young children.

As illnesses have surged, high-level lawmakers and government officials, including Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., have championed the industry instead of curbing it. In his federal role, Kennedy said he was “advocating” for raw milk and celebrated the release of a report to Make America Healthy Again with a toast of raw-milk shooters in the White House. The health department did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about the new professional guidance or the pediatric group’s call for a ban on raw milk sales.

Rep. Rosa DeLauro, a Connecticut Democrat who chairs the Congressional Food Safety Caucus, told ProPublica that she is taking the guidance of the academy “very seriously.”

“They see firsthand what these illnesses can do to children,” she said in an emailed statement. “Right now, Secretary of Health and Human Services RFK Jr. cannot even bring himself to tell parents not to give it to their kids.”

DeLauro said she was “supportive of any policy that reduces risk of exposure to harmful foods,” including putting warning labels on raw-milk products and maintaining adequate funding for outbreak prevention and tracking. 

Federal law restricts the sale of raw milk across state lines, but states can decide how it can be sold within their boundaries. In recent years, proponents have fought to increase access to raw milk within states, often opposing efforts to limit its sales. People can legally purchase raw milk in all but a handful of states, either directly from a store or from a farmer, or even as “pet food.”

Last week, ProPublica detailed the case of two girls severely sickened last year after consuming raw goat milk from an unregulated farm in southern California. The state, which is teeming with black-market dairies, did little to punish the farmer who sold the families the milk. It allowed her to provide her own sample for testing, weeks after the outbreak began, and did not independently sample her grounds for traces of the pathogen, as state investigators have done in other cases. (The farmer told ProPublica that her milk, which tested negative for pathogens, did not cause the outbreak and claimed the families had knowingly bought milk that was not for human consumption, which they deny.) 

The mother of one of the girls, a toddler who nearly died, had read about the purported benefits of unpasteurized milk on a site for the Raw Milk Institute, a nonprofit founded by Mark McAfee, one of the nation’s most prolific sellers. In a profile of the California farmer, ProPublica chronicled how social media influencers have amplified his claims and helped him build what is now a $30 million-a-year business even as regulators have linked it to more than a dozen recalls and outbreaks that have sickened hundreds. (McAfee previously defended the claims made on the institute’s website and maintained to ProPublica that raw milk still has therapeutic benefits.) 

Members of the academy said they read and circulated ProPublica’s reporting as they drafted their statement. 

“This product is being marketed to families as being beneficial for their kids,” said Dr. Adam Ratner, a pediatric infectious disease doctor in New York City and one of the lead authors of the academy’s revised statement. “They don’t see the risks, and unwittingly they end up making a decision that is much more dangerous.”

The academy first published a policy statement on raw milk in 2014, endorsing a nationwide ban on its sale and encouraging its members to reach out to state representatives to advocate for such a restriction. The statement published this week reaffirms this appeal with recent epidemiological evidence. In addition, it cites a growing concern of highly pathogenic avian influenza, which has been shown to contaminate unpasteurized milk.

Racine, the academy’s president, told ProPublica that the policy was also updated on account of “the rise in the discussion about the alleged benefits of raw milk and the fact that more people are experimenting with using it.” 

“Prevention really is the best single way to keep children healthy and safe, and this is a preventive move,” he said. “The more that we can disseminate this information to a greater number of people, the healthier we’re going to be able to keep the children of this country.”

The post American Academy of Pediatrics Renews Call for Ban on Raw Milk appeared first on ProPublica.