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.
How many american tax dollars were wasted on this DOGE???
Right, they’ve perfected the rocket, now we just need to load Elon onto the next flight.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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…
That’s our money, every penny.
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.
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.
He titled himself as the chief engineer of SpaceX. And this is no joke.
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.
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.
Unfortunately his fucking up has now been subsidized
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.
Remember a few years back when Trump was bemoaning Elon’s rockets to nowhere?
Pepperidge… Forbes remembers.
That article is a wild. Feels like we are in a story with terrible foreshadowing and retcons
I think we’re in the Matrix where the machines have found a superior alternate fuel source.
Wait until you hear of Vance criticising Trump.
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.
All billionaires really care about is money. And anything they say is what they think is in their best interest to earn more money. Nothing a billionaire says or does is sincere.
Yes, but this is even worse than the naked and rapacious pursuit of profit.
It is failing at even producing profit, literally burning through billions of dollars, not even accomplishing anything.
We are now at the stage where basically all the wealthiest and most powerful people are so high on their own supply, so deluded into believing they are geniuses, they are seemingly burning down the entire economy through sheer incompetence.
Trump seems to genuienly believe that international balances of trade just work the same as a hotel’s revenues vs costs.
Elon seems to genuienly believe his incompetent approach to engineering will actually result in market viable products.
… And seemingly at least half of Americans are just part of these personality cults, all facts and evidence be damned.
It sure sucks to be alive duringthe time period of humanity being filtered by the great filter.
You’re forgetting the lesson of the economics collapse of 2008. Everybody suffered except for the wealthy. They actually profited off that collapse. People’s 401k’s were being wiped clean… well, who was buying those shares at record low prices?
Point being, if it looks like Musk and Trump are trying to burn down the economy, it is not through incompetence, it is knowing they will only gain power from this collapse.
I hear what you are saying, and I do agree that the wealthy become more wealthy and the poor become more poor after a large collapse.
But I honestly do not think Trump and Elon are actually trying to fail this hard intentionally.
I genuinely believe they are so completely full of themselves that they think what they are doing… will actually work as they say it will.
The result is still the same, but I truly think that Trump and Elon will either be surprised when this all blows up in their faces, or further retreat into delusion, like Hitler in his bunker.
The people around them that are encouraging their actions? Many of them probably are smart enough to know how this will play out, but a lot of them are also very, very stupid.
Again I completely agree that the net outcome is easily discernible to a non lunatic, and a lot of non lunatics are cynically playing into all this… but we live in an era of increasingly widespread lunacy, of true believers that will have complete dissasociative personality collapse when they see all their ideas were wrong, or invent their own delusional alternate realities where they were in fact right and all bad news is deep state fake news illuminati lies.
I really do think a lot of these idiots believe their own bullshit to a significant degree and are not lying in the sense of saying one thing will happen when they know another thing actually will.
They’re just actually insane.
The only real difference between Mike Lindell and Elon Musk is Elon got more buy in. Their mindsets are the same: They’re right, because they believe they are, and to the extent they have money and influence, they’ll invent their own realities to maintain their delusions.
It pisses me off that I’m rooting against Space X, a company with an unarguably cool mission and product. Fuck Musk.
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.
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”
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 that fucker. I hope he drops dead and SpaceX lives on.
Whats cool about mining colonies on other planets? They will probably send
slavesprisoners there.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.
Elon Musk watched The Expanse, looked at the Belters, and thought to himself, “Yes, this is the ideal human living condition.”
He will just make you a slave there, dont buy into this bullshit
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?
No, because he wants SpaceX to succeed!
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.
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.
Oh, fuck me…
:p If they were the beasts, the “godly” would line up to take the mark.
Are those astronauts back on earth yet? No? Still stranded on the ISS? Okay…
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
