Maria Pointer was stepping out of her shower when the floor beneath her feet started to shake, the vibration soon followed by a roaring blast. “At first I thought it was a bomb,” she says. “I thought, ‘Iran has bombed SpaceX.’ ”But foreign actors weren’t to blame for the towering fireball that had just erupted eight miles from Pointer’s home on Long Island, near Port Isabel. The accident was the result of the bursting of tanks that held 1,170 tons of cryogenically cooled liquid oxygen and 330 tons of methane propellant for SpaceX’s Starship, which was undergoing routine testing at the company’s South Texas launch facility. At 11:05 p.m. on June 18, a chain reaction took the 171-foot-tall spacecraft and its test stand down in a…
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