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.
I’m excited for their Musk x Boeing Air Force One collab
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.
Hope he’s on the next flight
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The hidden cost of 60-hour work weeks.
Good
Not a failure. The whole point of R&D before doing a genuine payload is to remove this sort of issue. While the association of the company with Musk is truly crappy, this explosion is genuinely useful.
If this project were European or under a different administration, I would feel the same.
It is usefull but the trouble is that they should be much and much more certain about their designs. Let’s say they want 99.99% reliability for real payload then they should by now be at 99.9% . If they want to do it by trail and error they would need to do a lot trials to show that they actually achieved that reliability. Otherwise the next one is still just as likely to explode. I guess what I’m trying to say is that you can’t get there by trial and error.
How many american tax dollars were wasted on this DOGE???
How’s that HLS coming? BONT and Dynetics are dying to know.
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…
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.
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
Wait until you hear of Vance criticising Trump.
I think we’re in the Matrix where the machines have found a superior alternate fuel source.
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.
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I assume when Musk decided he wanted it to move faster his disruption undermined the process, meaning he sabotaged it.
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Can you share any of those anecdotes?
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If It is, they’re assholes for not waiting until there’s a couple billionaires onboard
Sabotage, or the fact that the best rocket scientists probably don’t want to work for a Nazi on ketamine?
Hey last time that happened we ended up with the atomic bomb.
The bomb wasn’t successfully developed by the ones working for the Nazi on ketamine…
I would like to know whatever you think you are talking about, because of definitely not the Manhattan project
The joke is all the good scientists that didn’t wanna work for the nazi left and came to America
Where’s the ketamine for the rest of us already?
I feel so bad for SpaceX engineers. If you grew up dreaming of space, you learn the math and science, and end up with that piece of shit as the figurehead for all your work.
At least Elon doesn’t actually run things at SpaceX, despite what he might say in public. Gwynne Shit well actually runs the company, and is likely the reason it’s actually pretty on track and hasn’t gone the way of Tesla.
Starship is not like any other rocket currently being made, and it’s being built in an iterative process, unlike the legacy rocket manufacturers, and even most new companies. This design process is intended to make changes and break things at every step, in the real world. Then make changes to try and fix those problems, and test it again. And not every step will fix previous issues. They’re building multiple Boosters and Starships simultaneously, and none of the ones being launched are the newest version at this point of development. They’re all older models by the time they fly.
All true, but he’s still their official overall leader, company owner, and “lead engineer” and that really, really sucks.
asdf
Hmm maybe the FAA should not have cleared the flight since the rocket in January wasn’t fully investigated to completion. You rush complex engineering and science and things go wrong.
The FAA was investigating SpaceX from the last explosion and grounded all spacex flight until after an investigation. Then, the nazi-in-chief fired the FAA leader to get his way.
This is fucking comical. For too sure why regulations are out on place. Maybe if (f)Elon investigated like they should have, this wouldn’t have happened.
(m)Elon, 62
enjoy the headspace images
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No, because he wants SpaceX to succeed!
It pisses me off that I’m rooting against Space X, a company with an unarguably cool mission and product. Fuck Musk.
Fuck that fucker. I hope he drops dead and SpaceX lives on.
There is NOTHING cool about SpaceX and there never was.
Musk claimed it was “Plan B” but there is no fucking Plan B, if we destroy the earth that is it!!
Musk and Trump are the idiots in Don’t look up! And the movie nailed it!The coolest thing about Space X is that it knocked about 100 million dollars off the cost of putting a satellite in orbit. More, if you consider the possibility of multiple small satellites sharing a launch to a similar orbit.
This enabled many, many small research companies to begin developing satellites for Earth and atmospheric imaging which is advancing our ability to collect precise data about things like greenhouse gas emissions.
Fuck Musk, absolutely, but a lower barrier to entry to putting things in space absolutely has utility.
Is that something Musk claims? Because you know Musk is full of shit right?
I wouldn’t be surprised if he compares to the space shuttle, which was always infamous for being extremely expensive.No that’s what data claims, I wrote a paper about this last year and did a bunch of research for it.
Fuck Musk, absolutely, but a lower barrier to entry to putting things in space absolutely has utility.
Have you actually seen how many Starlink satellites surround Earth? There little room for more. Source
Do…do you think those dots are to scale?
That image is so incredibly silly.
First, there are fewer than 20k starlink satellites, each about 3m long. If you put 20k 3m objects on the surface of the planet would you think that they were taking up all the room? Of course not. And the amount of free space available in LEO is even greater than at the surface.
Second, if they had made the “satellites” on that image to scale, you wouldn’t be able to see them at all. The approximate surface area of LEO where the satellites are is like 8x10^8 km^2. They aren’t running out of space.
tl;dr: the satellites aren’t “running out of room”
Whats cool about mining colonies on other planets? They will probably send
slavesprisoners there.Elon Musk watched The Expanse, looked at the Belters, and thought to himself, “Yes, this is the ideal human living condition.”
the cool thing is that it will give these “christian” dictators in the US something to do, other than destroying earth, that will hopefully distract them from destroying earth in the first place. and conveniently, it would also send them very, very far away, with low chance of them ever returning, i hope.
He will just make you a slave there, dont buy into this bullshit
Going to space under capitalism makes no sense.
Why should space exploration need or want a profit motive?
Create an anarcho-communist society where we firstly house, feed, and educate everyone. Explore space for the pure purpose of exploration in conditions where we can all collaborate without the need of competition and destruction.
I have a family member that works as an engineer building parts for various spacecraft. They get excited about the possibility of finding a renewable energy source and just in general what science can gain and learn from space that will make life better on earth.
Do with that what you will, I’m neutral, I’m just providing a different perspective that I think is relevant.
I think that a lot of rank-and-file professional scientists share that motivation. I know that deep down I am still a wide eyed child who got into science for those very reasons.
I find that trait less common once you get to director/general manager type roles. There’s a selection process that favors less idealistic (aka sociopathic) mindsets.
I personally think the innovation we need desperately is to figure out how to stop putting machiavelian monsters into positions of power.
Enforcing anti-trust laws is low-hanging fruit. Then, Article 5 the Constitution to explicitly require civil law (law by legislation) over common law (law by precedent); it’s slower, but France and Germany get by.
I’d much rather mine resources in an asteroid ring than on Earth. Polluting a lifeless chunk of rock in vacuum makes a lot more sense to me.
We’ve got a long way to go before we get there, but we won’t get there by waiting until we’ve the rest of society perfect first.
