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.
…Its the year 2026, January… What feelings like a decade of misadministration has come to fruition. China has “developed” the most advanced paper-like electronic sheet material with a brain interface. We use a pencil now. Graphite! Who knew!
The world’s a pretty crazy place right now. If we put aside personalities and politics for a moment and focus on the engineering achievements, SpaceX is doing groundbreaking work. A few explosions here and there are part of the R&D process — they’re just big and obvious enough that they’re easy for us to spectate. Given the success of their Falcon 9 platform, that’s a cost they can easily eat and a risk enticing enough to take. NASA engineers a generation ago were similarly breaking ground on their frontier, be it orbiting the moon or preventing fires in space by avoiding free floating graphite particles 😉
Meaningless if the end goal is murdering some people while helping others.
Can you explain further? How is SpaceX’s goal to murder people? That feels misplaced and I’d love understand what you mean!
Elon is selling access to the net to ruzzians invading Ukraine. How is that misplaced?
I’m embarrassed to have interviewed by that shit company back before their first rocket made it.
I always forget about that. Do you think that reflects more on Elon or SpaceX employees?
I wouldn’t work there if the goal was empowering that asshole with murderous tools.
Yeah I hear you. There are truly very few options for work where you can be absolutely certain that no line can be drawn to enabling violence. Some are more obvious, blatant, and intentional than others.