SpaceX’s Starship explodes in second failure for Musk’s Mars program
SpaceX’s Starship explodes in second failure for Musk’s Mars program
Back-to-back mishaps indicate big setbacks for program to launch satellites and send humans to the moon and Mars
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.
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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.
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Remember a few years back when Trump was bemoaning Elon's rockets to nowhere?
Pepperidge... Forbes remembers.
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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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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?
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No, because he wants SpaceX to succeed!
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Ughhhh just get in the rocket, rocket boy!!!
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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.
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It pisses me off that I'm rooting against Space X, a company with an unarguably cool mission and product. Fuck Musk.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Fuck that fucker. I hope he drops dead and SpaceX lives on.
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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.
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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."
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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.
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He will just make you a slave there, dont buy into this bullshit
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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.
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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.
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(m)Elon, 62
enjoy the headspace images
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Maybe the internal GPS was looking for the Gulf of Mexico and just gave up?
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Right, they've perfected the rocket, now we just need to load Elon onto the next flight.
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Then I saw a second beast, coming out of the earth. It had two horns like a lamb, but it spoke like a dragon. It exercised all the authority of the first beast on its behalf, and made the earth and its inhabitants worship the first beast, whose fatal wound had been healed. And it performed great signs, even causing fire to come down from heaven to the earth in full view of the people. Because of the signs it was given power to perform on behalf of the first beast, it deceived the inhabitants of the earth.
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American evangelicals are fucking ushering him in. I'm not religious, but if it's all actually real, at least they will burn in hell.
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Oh, fuck me...
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:p If they were the beasts, the “godly” would line up to take the mark.
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Hey guys, can we hear again how low Earth orbit is dumb and we should just go to Mars? Asking for a friend.
/s
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Remember that Elon said we would land on Mars by 2024?
We haven't even started thinking about a Mars misson lmao
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How many american tax dollars were wasted on this DOGE???
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I say this as someone who loathes Musk, its not a big deal that this exploded.
But the success or failures of the program should also not be meaningfully attributed to Musk anyway. He owns the company but hes not an engineer.
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I personally want Musk's space program to fail because scientific advances and achievements need to belong to the people, not some corporate asshole. Publically funded science is the only way to go. Also, NASA seemed to have mastered the rocket back in the 60s--SpaceX can't even do that.
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Unfortunately NASA rockets are also made by corporate assholes because everything is outsourced to the military industrial complex
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NASA's mission is to pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery, and aeronautics research. I’ll support any model that enables those principles. They paved the way in the 60s and that’s enabled others to succeed. Isn’t that the highest form of achievement? Look at what SpaceX has done with their massively reusable Falcon 9. The space shuttle flew 135 missions over 40 years; that’s about 3 a year. There’s been 453 Falcon 9 flights (134 in 2024 alone) and a single Falcon 9 stack has been reused 26 times… all of those achievements happened within a span of 15 years. I think it’s safe to say that they’ve mastered the rocket. You’re just seeing the R&D phase of their new one …which has the added spectacle of some rapid unscheduled disassemblies that we get to witness 😉
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The Saturn V was built by Boeing, North American, and Douglas.
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Not all space corporations are assholes as you say. I think rocket lab isn't to bad.
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I think it can be attributed to Musk because he's the driving force behind pushing the "move fast and break things" mentality into rocket science. They haven't figured out why the last one blew up and they go ahead and launch another one which looks like it blew up for the same reasons.
That might work with non-critical software, but when you're talking about large rockets it's bound to get people killed eventually. At the very least they could've built a launch site for testing where the rockets aren't going over populated areas. But naw, build it in Texas and fire untested rockets over Caribbean countries, because there's not enough white people in those countries for Musk to give a shit.
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He titled himself as the chief engineer of SpaceX. And this is no joke.
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Well I guess it's okay as long as he is not using the federal funding for Mars attempts, he can waste his shareholders money.
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Hope he's on the next flight
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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.
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I wonder if the reason for it failing this time was sabotage by SpaceX engineers.
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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.
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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.
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If It is, they're assholes for not waiting until there's a couple billionaires onboard
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America is footing this bill. This is no more musk's "Mars program" than it is MY mars program. Matter of fact, seeing as I pay taxes and he doesn't, it's more mine that his.
It's time to remove musk's U.S. subsidies for cars, rockets, and whatever else he's fucking up.
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Unfortunately his fucking up has now been subsidized
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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.
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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.
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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.
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fire in the skirt area
that could be a good porn movie 🤔
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Exact same symptom. Who knows what actually started it either time.
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Sorry Elon, you're just going to have to live in the hell you're creating.
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Looking forward to SpaceX fans continuing to talk about how much SpaceX is insulated from musk's stupidity thanks to Shotwell.
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The lady who thought you could cram a thousand people into a starship and do passenger ICBM launches?
The lady who was convinced this would be allowed by any government, anywhere in the world? A giant death tube with a thousand people hurtling towards a city at near orbital speeds, with the pinky promise that their engines will relight being the only things saving your city from ruin every day.
She’s a fucking idiot too.
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SpaceX can still pivot to a fireworks company and let decades old soviet rockets take people to the ISS. I'm sure that DOGE will cut the wasteful government grants this company gets.
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To be fair, only their crazy concept rocket keeps falling tests. The actual in use rockets have literally the best success/safety rate in history. Just a shame a Nazi owns the company.
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Fair enough. The engineering is pretty impressive. It would be even more impressive if it was owned by the public rather than a MEGAlomaniac high on ketamine
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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.
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Musk "speeding up" the program. Lol.
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i try very hard to compartmentalize space related stuff to keep it separate from current politics.
but this one does feel good. fuck elon
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I'm excited for their Musk x Boeing Air Force One collab
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May all things of Musk crash and burn
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To be fair, I’m gonna play devil’s advocate and point out that Falcon 9 is one of, if not the most reliable launch vehicles ever built, and their landing success rate is phenomenal, and that they got there by fucking up, a lot, and eventually figuring out how to not do that.
That being said, I’m getting pretty tired of Musk getting all of the credit for the work of countless engineers and scientists, where fuckboi’s physics doctorate doesn’t actually exist..
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That's our money, every penny.
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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.
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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.
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Fingers crossed that musk was on that rocket!!
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Fucking piece of shit
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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.
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This is what happens when you cut regulations and fire the people who oversee quality and safety over stupidity and greed.
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Are those astronauts back on earth yet? No? Still stranded on the ISS? Okay...
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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.4 failures, 50% success rate. Like a coin flip.-
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.
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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.
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Good
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I hope a space X employee is making these fail on purpose and keeps doing it
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The hidden cost of 60-hour work weeks.
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Move fast, break things, right?
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If I were a ninja this is exactly what I'd do.
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How's that HLS coming? BONT and Dynetics are dying to know.
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Thanks to this idiot being the ceo of the company people can finally realize how much of a waste this business is
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We spent millions on the stainless dildo flying machine. The ruzzians used a pencil.
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.....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!
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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 😉
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