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.

  • Goodmorningsunshine@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    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.

  • regrub@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    I wonder if the reason for it failing this time was sabotage by SpaceX engineers.

    • Mortoc@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      I feel so bad for SpaceX engineers. If you grew up dreaming of space, you learn the math and science, and end up with that piece of shit as the figurehead for all your work.

      • halcyoncmdr@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        At least Elon doesn’t actually run things at SpaceX, despite what he might say in public. Gwynne Shit well actually runs the company, and is likely the reason it’s actually pretty on track and hasn’t gone the way of Tesla.

        Starship is not like any other rocket currently being made, and it’s being built in an iterative process, unlike the legacy rocket manufacturers, and even most new companies. This design process is intended to make changes and break things at every step, in the real world. Then make changes to try and fix those problems, and test it again. And not every step will fix previous issues. They’re building multiple Boosters and Starships simultaneously, and none of the ones being launched are the newest version at this point of development. They’re all older models by the time they fly.

  • HalfSalesman@lemm.ee
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    1 month 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.

  • KulunkelBoom@lemm.ee
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    1 month ago

    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.