SpaceX’s Starship spacecraft exploded on Thursday minutes after lifting off from Texas, dooming an attempt to deploy mock satellites in the second consecutive failure this year for Elon Musk’s Mars rocket program.
Several videos on social media showed fiery debris streaking through the dusk skies near south Florida and the Bahamas after Starship’s breakup in space, which occurred shortly after it began to spin uncontrollably with its engines cut off, a SpaceX livestream of the mission showed.
The failure comes just more than a month after the company’s seventh Starship flight also ended in an explosive failure. The back-to-back mishaps occurred in early mission phases that SpaceX has easily surpassed previously, indicating serious setbacks for a program Musk has sought to speed up this year.
Ugh, I don’t actually hate the hardware rich testing strategy SpaceX uses, but you’re supposed to learn from your failures before launching the next rocket.
This looked like almost exactly the same issue - fire in the skirt area that catastrophically destroyed the engines.
Exact same symptom. Who knows what actually started it either time.
They are learning, but the versions launched are never the current version at launch time, they are all older models. As changes are made those changes go into the next one being built, not the ones currently under construction already, unless it’s an easy retrofit, like when they were changing the tile layouts.
And even those retrofitted changes may not be adequate depending on the cause. When dealing with lost vehicles you also have limited forensic evidence to use to determine root causes. Cameras don’t see everything sensors don’t log every aspect. And fixes you thought were adequate, may not actually be enough. That’s why they iterate and try again in the real world, instead of just simulating everything and hoping it works at launch for 10x the cost. These issues sometimes taking multiple tries to fix are an expected parts of the process.
fire in the skirt area
that could be a good porn movie 🤔
Pretty sure the other fire was on the inside due to an engine leak. This fire/leak was on the outside.
Both around the enginee, but different spots.
The thing they changed was cutting holes in the area where the fire was last time to “ventilate” it. I think it’s the same fire just blowing out the holes and melting something different.
Sorry Elon, you’re just going to have to live in the hell you’re creating.
Hey guys, can we hear again how low Earth orbit is dumb and we should just go to Mars? Asking for a friend.
/s
Remember when the FAA grounded him till he got this fix and then Musk told the FAA head to retire or be fired?
I think it’s wild that “better times” is now when corruption wasn’t so naked.
Remember a few years back when Trump was bemoaning Elon’s rockets to nowhere?
Pepperidge… Forbes remembers.
I mean SpaceX has had a much longer history of telling federal agencies (especially the EPA) to go fuck themselves, launching anyway, and having absolutely fuck all for repercussions.
All billionaires really care about is money. And anything they say is what they think is in their best interest to earn more money. Nothing a billionaire says or does is sincere.
Yes, but this is even worse than the naked and rapacious pursuit of profit.
It is failing at even producing profit, literally burning through billions of dollars, not even accomplishing anything.
We are now at the stage where basically all the wealthiest and most powerful people are so high on their own supply, so deluded into believing they are geniuses, they are seemingly burning down the entire economy through sheer incompetence.
Trump seems to genuienly believe that international balances of trade just work the same as a hotel’s revenues vs costs.
Elon seems to genuienly believe his incompetent approach to engineering will actually result in market viable products.
… And seemingly at least half of Americans are just part of these personality cults, all facts and evidence be damned.
It sure sucks to be alive duringthe time period of humanity being filtered by the great filter.
You’re forgetting the lesson of the economics collapse of 2008. Everybody suffered except for the wealthy. They actually profited off that collapse. People’s 401k’s were being wiped clean… well, who was buying those shares at record low prices?
Point being, if it looks like Musk and Trump are trying to burn down the economy, it is not through incompetence, it is knowing they will only gain power from this collapse.
I hear what you are saying, and I do agree that the wealthy become more wealthy and the poor become more poor after a large collapse.
But I honestly do not think Trump and Elon are actually trying to fail this hard intentionally.
I genuinely believe they are so completely full of themselves that they think what they are doing… will actually work as they say it will.
The result is still the same, but I truly think that Trump and Elon will either be surprised when this all blows up in their faces, or further retreat into delusion, like Hitler in his bunker.
The people around them that are encouraging their actions? Many of them probably are smart enough to know how this will play out, but a lot of them are also very, very stupid.
Again I completely agree that the net outcome is easily discernible to a non lunatic, and a lot of non lunatics are cynically playing into all this… but we live in an era of increasingly widespread lunacy, of true believers that will have complete dissasociative personality collapse when they see all their ideas were wrong, or invent their own delusional alternate realities where they were in fact right and all bad news is deep state fake news illuminati lies.
I really do think a lot of these idiots believe their own bullshit to a significant degree and are not lying in the sense of saying one thing will happen when they know another thing actually will.
They’re just actually insane.
The only real difference between Mike Lindell and Elon Musk is Elon got more buy in. Their mindsets are the same: They’re right, because they believe they are, and to the extent they have money and influence, they’ll invent their own realities to maintain their delusions.
That article is a wild. Feels like we are in a story with terrible foreshadowing and retcons
I think we’re in the Matrix where the machines have found a superior alternate fuel source.
Wait until you hear of Vance criticising Trump.
Ughhhh just get in the rocket, rocket boy!!!
Yeah, Musk is just not micro managing enough. If he was on board he’d be able to fix any issues that come up in real time.
He should take some friends with him to make sure that they can see how good he is at fixing things.
Yeah, the perfect opportunity to try to impress Trump and Vance.
It’s because he spends all his time being a top ranked gamer, don’t you know…
He pays some guy to do it, which is even sadder.
That’s the joke…
Good
Fingers crossed that musk was on that rocket!!
And we need at least like 7 consecutive launches like this to fuel a moon mission. No wonder he’s talking about Mars again, more time to grift off taxpayer money and not be on the hook to actually deliver any time soon.
Worst fucking timeline.
Second failure
Uhh, that title is wrong.
As is clarified in the body of the article, this is test number 8 for Starship. Zero successful flights.
This is integrated flight test 8. It is only the second test flight for a block 2 ship, hence second failure. Several block 1 ships splashed down successfully in the ocean, so you’re objectively wrong here.
Oh sorry, I didn’t realize that blowing up the launch pad because they didn’t bother to calculate if it could survive without a sacrificial water barrier to boil away counted as a success.
Everyone hit by that debris had it coming like the whales, right?
I still get to give spacex shit for their failures consistently causing damage and chaos and disruption to the rest of the world. They are menaces that don’t think through the consequences of their actions.
Just be accurate next time, there’s nothing wrong with criticizing the things they do wrong, just don’t lie about the facts.
I wasn’t lying if I was honestly mistaken. Thanks for the correction.
Fucking piece of shit
I’m excited for their Musk x Boeing Air Force One collab
Has he tried firing half the SpaceX employees, slicing half the budget and making everyone still there send an email detailing what they did this week?
No, because he wants SpaceX to succeed!
i try very hard to compartmentalize space related stuff to keep it separate from current politics.
but this one does feel good. fuck elon
Was a boom.boom or kaboom? I didn’t watch became I don’t give a single shit about any of that nazis companies anymore.
How’s that HLS coming? BONT and Dynetics are dying to know.
