SpaceX's Starship Explosion Recreated As GLSL Shader

After Starship exploded over the Atlantic Ocean during its seventh flight test last week, photos and videos quickly spread across social media. Much of the footage, taken from Turks and Caicos, showed mesmerizing orange balls of light racing across the sky, leaving behind trails of smoke.

While some experts argue that the attention given to the light show, as many people and media outlets did, reflects a misunderstanding of the environmental impact and the littering caused by scattered debris, this version powered by math is both beautiful and harmless. Also, much cheaper. Using just 249 characters, XorDev created debris reentering atmosphere with code written for twigl's Geekest mode, an online editor made for one-tweet shaders, offering a GIF generator, sound shader, and a live broadcast of the coding process.

The developer has also shared this piece on Shadertoy, complete with comments to explain how it works:

Check out more of XorDev's shaders made with very little code:

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