It was just that T-Pain happened to be at the right place at the wrong time or the wrong place at the right time. Either way, the hip-hop icon and auto-tune pioneer unexpectedly came to find himself and his wife at the center of one of the maddest moments in recent aerospace history. And he was streaming the whole thing live, of course.
The "Bartender" hitmaker was chatting while on a yacht getaway when he noticed something strange in the sky. His natural inquisitiveness resulted in an unvarnished, in-the-moment response to what proved to be SpaceX's most recent Starship launch, which unfortunately did not play out as intended.
"We witnessed the SpaceX launch fail from the yacht!!! That was crazy," T-Pain wrote later in an Instagram post, sharing a clip of his astonished reaction.
At first, he was just another interested onlooker, breathlessly describing what he saw. "OK, what the f### is this?" he asked, peering into the sky. "Chat, what the f### is going on over there?"
His curiosity became a realization. "Oh, is that a SpaceX launch?" he said, beginning to put it together. "It seems like a launch… yes, I think it's a launch.
For a few seconds, he was mesmerized by the raw speed and energy of the rocket. "It's moving fast as s###," he said, clearly impressed. He followed in real-time as different stages of the launch passed.
"I'm not moving the camera, chat… Oh, you can see the boosters falling off and everything," he observed. “Oh, runnin’ boosters and s###… Yo, look at that muthaf###### s### fallin' off.
But then, the mood shifted.
"Yo, look at all that s### … Yo, this s### is moving so fast, bro," he said, his excitement shifting to confusion. The official launch feed eventually confirmed what was happening a short while later.
"And at this point, we've essentially lost contact with the ship … We are no longer receiving telemetry at this moment," the broadcast said.
"Yo, that's crazy! Yo, that's crazy," he quipped in disbelief. "Wait, is it going back down? Hey, it's going down, right? Where's the rest of it? Where's the one that just keeps going?"
Then came the final confirmation.
"They said it did blow up…," his wife told him.
"Oh, it did blow up?" T-Pain replied, overwhelmed with the moment. "That wasn't normal. Did we just film a f###### SpaceX crash?" Yes, they did.
During its eighth test launch, the SpaceX Starship appeared early on to be headed for success. But the mission took a disastrous turn shortly after entering space. Later reports indicated that only two of the six engines were operational, and the crew lost control of the vessel.
The failed launch left controllers scrambling to re-route planes from the debris field above the Bahamas. It was also compared to a failed test launch in January with debris raining into the ocean.
Although SpaceX has not yet fully identified what caused the malfunction, which the company charmingly calls a "rapid unscheduled disassembly," one thing's clear: this is one moment T-Pain and his viewers are not likely to forget anytime soon.
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