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.
Right, they’ve perfected the rocket, now we just need to load Elon onto the next flight.
i try very hard to compartmentalize space related stuff to keep it separate from current politics.
but this one does feel good. fuck elon
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…
Fucking piece of shit
Fingers crossed that musk was on that rocket!!
It pisses me off that I’m rooting against Space X, a company with an unarguably cool mission and product. Fuck Musk.
He will just make you a slave there, dont buy into this bullshit
Fuck that fucker. I hope he drops dead and SpaceX lives on.
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.
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.
This is what happens when you cut regulations and fire the people who oversee quality and safety over stupidity and greed.
Good
Maybe the internal GPS was looking for the Gulf of Mexico and just gave up?
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
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.
Are those astronauts back on earth yet? No? Still stranded on the ISS? Okay…
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.
Looking forward to SpaceX fans continuing to talk about how much SpaceX is insulated from musk’s stupidity thanks to Shotwell.
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.
