SpaceX accused of ‘drilling’ the edge of space with rocket launch

While Elon Musk is making changes at “X” (formerly Twitter), his other company, SpaceX, is under fire after is accused of “breaking through” the edge of space by launching one of his rockets.

That’s right, a new analysis by a panel of experts claims that a few weeks ago, from California, USA, a rocket from Elon Musk’s SpaceX company could “punch a hole in the Earth’s ionosphere.”

The reports explain that it will A Falcon 9 rocket launched on July 19. from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. The accusation that comes when the aerospace company confirmed in the last hours successful launch of Jupiter-3, the world’s largest private telecommunications satellite, launched July 28 by SpaceX.

In this regard, the space physicist Jeff Baumgardnerfrom Boston University (USA), said after seeing some images of the rocket that “it is quite possible that the launch was caused an ionospheric hole.”

“It’s a well-studied phenomenon when rockets start your engines at an altitude of 200 to 300 km above the surface of the earth, ”explained the Spaceweather expert.

Rockets often release water and carbon dioxide in their exhaust gases, which can “reduce the ionization process by more than two-thirds”as the investigation showed. This phenomenon occurs mainly in the F layer of the ionosphere, which has the highest electron density of all subregions.

History of other releases

However, this phenomenon is history. Studies have shown that with the increase in the number of rocket launches around the world, these holes are becoming more frequent in the ionospherewhich corresponds to the layer around the Earth.

In SpaceX history, one of its Falcon 9 rockets, launched in August 2017 with the Taiwanese Formosat 5 satellite, produced “giant circular acoustic shock waves in the ionosphere about five minutes after takeoff.