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.

  • HalfSalesman@lemm.eeEnglish
    265·
    2 days ago

    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.

    • FabledAepitaph@lemmy.world
      172·
      2 days ago

      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.

      • AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.worldEnglish
        10·
        2 days ago

        Unfortunately NASA rockets are also made by corporate assholes because everything is outsourced to the military industrial complex

      • blakemiller@lemmy.world
        91·
        2 days ago

        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 😉

    • SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca
      14·
      2 days ago

      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.

    • parrhesia
      2·
      2 days ago

      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.