it’s the fuel that does it, they’ll blow up a tank of gasoline to get that effect for movies

NASA has the world record for astronauts killed, most of these private flights are only blowing up cargo or empty test rockets.

What nasa fuck up do you mean? In my experience most rocket nerds just think SLS is a bad design (Senate launch system is one nickname), and that nasa is continuously hamstrung by politics and budget. The loss of two entire shuttle crews is what I think of first. Those have been studied to death and while there were bad decisions that ultimately led there, the shuttle itself was just an inherently dangerous craft.

It’s unfortunately pretty normal for new rocket platforms to experience failures and with rockets almost any kind of failure results in a nexplosion 😆. Falcon 9 had its share of failures (not counting those related to reusability) but it’s now a mature design with a very good reliability record.

Luckily this was an engine test fire, so they should have had everyone a safe distance away before the anomaly occurred.

Yeah seeing that explosion I can’t imagine there were no casualties. Though this was an engine test so I imagine everyone was in some sort of fortified building and as violent as it looks it’s mostly just the rocket fuel combusting, not a lot of actual explosive force as you can see the towers still standing. Like the others said it looks like a movie explosion because it is very similar. It’s easy to get a massive fireball without a lot of actually destructive force (outside the brief flash of heat).