T-Pain unknowingly witnessed a historic but unfortunate moment during a live stream when SpaceX’s latest Starship rocket launch ended in failure.
The “Bartender” singer was casually engaging with his chat when he noticed something unusual in the sky, leading to an unfiltered, real-time reaction to the incident. T-Pain shared a brief clip on Instagram capturing the moment the rocket’s flight path came into view for he and his wife during their maritime getaway.
“We saw the SpaceX launch fail from the yacht!!! That was crazy,” T-Pain wrote in the caption of the post.
In the video itself, T-Pain’s demeanor teetered back and forth between genuine excitement to concern once the weight of the situation was uncovered by his viewers.
“Okay, what the f### is this?” T-Pain asked as he spotted the spectacle. “Chat, what the f### is going on over there?”
His curiosity quickly turned into recognition as he realized what he was watching.
“Oh, is that a SpaceX launch?” he questioned. “It look like a launch… Yeah, I think it is a launch.”
At first, he marveled at the rocket’s speed and its apparent success.
“It’s moving fast as s###,” he remarked.
As he continued to observe, he noted key moments of the launch process.
“I’m not moving the camera, chat… Oh, you can see the boosters falling off and everything,” he said. “Oh, there’s boosters falling off and s###… Yo, look at that f###### s### falling off.”
However, the awe-factor quickly diminished as he listened to updates about the ship’s stability.
“Yo, look at all that s###… Yo, this s### is moving so fast, bro,” he said.
Soon after T-Pain’s comments, the launch feed confirmed what had happened. “And at this point, we’ve essentially lost contact with the ship… We’re no longer receiving telemetry at this moment,” the broadcast stated.
T-Pain could hardly believe what he was witnessing.
“Yo, that’s crazy! Yo, that’s nuts,” he said in shock. “Wait, is it coming back down? Hey, it’s going down, right? Where’s the rest of it? Where’s the one that keeps going?”
Moments later, he received confirmation of the explosion from his stream viewers. “They said it did blow up…,” his wife said, to which T-Pain replied, “Oh, it did blow up? That wasn’t normal. Did we just catch a f###### SpaceX crash?”
T-Pain and his viewers weren’t the only ones caught off guard by the dramatic turn of events. SpaceX’s Starship, in its eighth test launch on Thursday, successfully made it into space before experiencing a critical failure. According to TMZ, the SpaceX crew lost “attitude control” of the ship and only two of its six engines were operating properly.
As debris from the failed launch began to fall, air traffic controllers scrambled to reroute flights away from impacted areas over the Bahamas. The incident drew comparisons to another test launch failure in January, where debris rained down in a similar location.
While SpaceX has yet to pinpoint the exact cause of the “rapid unscheduled disassembly,” as they described it, the mishap is unlikely to sit well with Elon Musk. The company will likely conduct a thorough investigation, but for now, it’s clear that this latest launch attempt fell far short of expectations.
