Hong Kong’s Beijing Tianbing space company launched a rocket by accident on Sunday while testing its first-stage power system.

The company, which is also known as Space Pioneer, tried to test the first stage of the Tianlong-3 rocket by firing it up. However, because of a structural flaw, the rocket was sent into space, where it was destroyed.

“The engine thrust reached 820 tons during the test run,” the company said in a statement. “The first-stage rocket ignited normally.” “Due to structural failure at the connection between the rocket body and the test bench, the first-stage rocket separated from the launch pad.”

Soon after the rocket took off without warning, the computer on board turned off by itself. The rocket was seen flying straight up for a short time before turning horizontal and falling back to the ground.

Wow. This is apparently what was supposed to be a STATIC FIRE TEST today of a Tianlong-3 first stage by China's Space Pioneer. That's catastrophic, not static. Firm was targeting an orbital launch in the coming months. https://t.co/BY9MgJeE7A pic.twitter.com/L6ronwLW1N

— Andrew Jones (@AJ_FI) June 30, 2024

The rocket went into the mountains about 0.9 miles (1.5 km) from where it was launched in Gongyi City, Henan Province, China. According to the company, there have been no reported injuries, and all personnel had been evacuated from the area before the launch.

Another view here. Got to hope that there are no casualties. This is absolutely wild. And Space Pioneer has already reached orbit with Tianlong-2, so this is just staggering. https://t.co/QlQT13FNtI pic.twitter.com/F58tJhVoRJ

— Andrew Jones (@AJ_FI) June 30, 2024

It’s not often that something like this happens in space history. Harvard University astrophysicist Brad Tucker told the New York Times that the last time something similar happened was in 1952, when NASA’s Viking 8 broke free of its anchors and landed 8 kilometers (5 miles) away in the desert.

The Tianlong-3 rocket is meant to be used more than once so that the very high cost of space travel can be cut down. The newest version should be able to send up to 17 tons into low-Earth orbit or 14 tons into an orbit around the sun. Beijing Tianbing says the unintended flight was the most powerful system test of any test done in China, though the debris on the nearby hills shows it wasn’t exactly a resounding success.

Beryl is the first named hurricane of the Atlantic season this year. It has already made history before it even got to the Caribbean this morning, and officials say it looks like it will keep doing so.

When does the Atlantic hurricane season start? It starts on June 1 and ends on November 30. The first named hurricane usually happens in early to mid-August, and the first major hurricane (Category 3 or higher) usually happens between late August and early September.

Hurricane Beryl has already gone against the flow twice. A tropical storm gave it its start in late June, on Friday, the 28th. Second, it quickly became a major hurricane. On Sunday, its strong winds made it a Category 4 storm, making it the earliest storm of that strength to ever form in the Atlantic.

An advisory from the National Hurricane Center this morning said that Beryl will still be an “extremely dangerous” hurricane when it hits land in the Caribbean, even though it has weakened back down to Category 3.

“Hurricane-force winds, a life-threatening storm surge, and damaging waves could be very bad when Beryl goes over parts of the Windward Islands. St. Vincent and the Grenadines and Grenada will have the highest risk of the core starting later this morning,” the center said.

The storm’s strongest sustained winds are now estimated to be around 195 kilometers per hour (120 miles per hour). Winds that are that strong can uproot trees and do a lot of damage to even well-built homes.

The National Hurricane Center also said that the storm surge could raise water levels up to 1.8 to 2.7 meters (6 to 9 feet) above normal tide levels. This would bring “large and destructive” waves to coastal areas.

With 7.6 to 15.2 centimeters (3 to 6 inches) of possible rain, it’s easy to see why people in the Caribbean islands that will be hit by the hurricane first are being told to get ready as much as they can.

If your home is unsafe or could suffer damage from flooding or wind, stay put or move to a safe place. Food, water, and medicine should be kept safe for at least seven days in containers that won’t leak. Drains outside should be clear, and any loose items should be safely in place by now. “Put sandbags by all of your home’s doors,” the Trinidad and Tobago Meteorological Service warned early Monday morning.

It’s going to stay a “powerful hurricane” even after Beryl moves across the Caribbean Sea and over those first islands.

The damage from this hurricane is already clear, but it might not be the only one this year. The National Weather Service of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said in May that the 2024 hurricane season would be “extraordinary,” with four to seven major hurricanes possible.

The ionosphere is part of the upper atmosphere. It goes from the edge of space to deep inside it. Because there are no electrons on those atoms and molecules, they are electrically charged. What’s going on near the surface and the Sun both have an effect on them. Since new structures have been found, new observations suggest that there is still more to learn.

Observations of the Limb and Disk (GOLD) mission from NASA made the work possible. It was found that the ionosphere has some strange structures that look like the letters X and C. These have something to do with crests and bubbles in the ionosphere, which are places where there is more plasma than others.

People have seen the X-shaped structures before. They were believed to be the result of intense activity, either from a powerful volcanic eruption or an increase in the solar wind, which is the stream of charged particles from the sun, after solar flares or coronal mass ejections. This is where GOLD showed that X-shaped formations can also happen when it’s quiet.

In a statement, lead author Fazlul Laskar from the University of Colorado’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) said, “Earlier reports of merging were only during geomagnetically disturbed conditions—it is an unexpected feature during geomagnetic quiet conditions.”

When there are quiet times, the presence of X-shaped formations suggests that something else is going on. Computer models suggest that churning in the lower atmosphere might be able to pull some of the plasma down, which is what makes the crests merge into an X shape even when there aren’t any major disturbances.

A scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center named Jeffrey Klenzing said, “The X is strange because it suggests that there are much more localized driving factors.” “This is what we would expect during extreme events, but seeing it during ‘quiet time’ suggests that the activity in the lower atmosphere is strongly affecting the structure of the ionosphere.”

Along with the crests, the bubble also turns into a letter shape. Most of the time, these bubbles are long and thin because they follow the planet’s magnetic lines. But some bubbles curve into the shape of a C or an upside-down C. Even though the ionosphere is 50 to 400 miles above the ground (80 to 640 kilometers), the process is thought to be connected to wind on Earth.

As one of the strange things they found, the team found plasma bubbles that were only a few hundred kilometers apart. This means that the ionosphere is not at all calm; there is a lot of turbulence there.

Deepak Karan, lead author of the paper on the C-shaped formations and also at LASP, said, “These two opposite-shaped plasma bubbles had never been thought of or seen before they were so close together.”

“The fact that the bubbles are of such different shapes and are so close to each other shows that the atmosphere is more complicated than we thought,” Klenzing said.

You can find these two papers here and here. They were both published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics.