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I thought the issue with throwing up a bunch of dust is that the planet this rocket was starting from is inhabited.

• krisoft 4y ago
  Not quite. It is speculated that the rocket engines were damaged by chunks of the pad hitting them. That is a danger to the launch itself even if the dust wouldn’t bother anyone else.
• George83728 4y ago
  The dust is a problem for the community in that immediate area on the order of miles, but on a planetary level it's nothing compared to the dust the mining, construction, etc industries produce. Per the ATF: "In 2015, the latest date for which statistics are available, the U.S. used slightly less than 4.5 billion pounds of explosives." Of course measures are often taken to reduce rock dust falling on people, but away from populated areas it's common to blast rock in the open air, in vastly greater quantities than the debris lofted by this rocket.