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.
May all things of Musk crash and burn
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…
Are those astronauts back on earth yet? No? Still stranded on the ISS? Okay…
How many american tax dollars were wasted on this DOGE???
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.
Right, they’ve perfected the rocket, now we just need to load Elon onto the next flight.
We spent millions on the stainless dildo flying machine. The ruzzians used a pencil.
…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.
Remember that Elon said we would land on Mars by 2024?
We haven’t even started thinking about a Mars misson lmao
That was always absurd, on the face of it. Heck, I don’t even see the appeal of going to Mars.
Heck, I don’t even see the appeal of going to Mars
There’s no people there
Well, that’s one thing it has going for it.
Obama era had everyone optimistic about the future.
We also desperately wanted any space program. The space shuttles were retired in 2011 and we were reliant on Russia for flights at that point.
Musk said the things progressives wanted to hear, but eventually we wanted substance. That’s when he shifted to catering to conservatives, who are ok with being lied to.
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.
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.
The Saturn V was built by Boeing, North American, and Douglas.
Unfortunately NASA rockets are also made by corporate assholes because everything is outsourced to the military industrial complex
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 😉
Not all space corporations are assholes as you say. I think rocket lab isn’t to bad.
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.
He titled himself as the chief engineer of SpaceX. And this is no joke.
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.
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.
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.
This is what happens when you cut regulations and fire the people who oversee quality and safety over stupidity and greed.
I hope a space X employee is making these fail on purpose and keeps doing it
The hidden cost of 60-hour work weeks.
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.
I keep saying this, but christianity ended at the siege of munster.
If that’s the case, then Islam ended at The Siege of Fort Tabarsi.
don’t know enough about that part of history, I mostly know that the contenders for ‘last real christians’ were either the pre-munster anabaptists, or weirdo fanatics like john brown. it’s not about the killing; christians had been killing each other for a WHILE before that.
Oh, fuck me…
:p If they were the beasts, the “godly” would line up to take the mark.
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.
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.
Thanks to this idiot being the ceo of the company people can finally realize how much of a waste this business is
