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.

    • werefreeatlast@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      …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!

      • blakemiller@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        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 😉