Something is obviously broken with the process here. Nobody would ever fly on this thing. It's a shit show.

Watching the Elonati inhaling copium and trying to PR spin the disaster known as Starshit in real time is both comforting and depressing. How much longer before someone gets killed by SpaceX because corners were cut, regulations were too "burdensome", or people inside were afraid to call Elon out.

I'd quote the lyric "I make the rockets go up, I don't care where they come down, that's not my department, says Werner von Braun" but Elon Musk can't even build rockets well enough to make it that far into the song.

Yo @grok is this real?

I have a feeling that they change some fundamental feature with every iteration, because they cant hit their performance targets, so everytime they actually go out and test its basically a new rocket and all that previous test data is useless.

I often confuse rockets and missiles, too

Would never happen to a rocket which had embraced the Saviour Lord Jesus Christ.

spacex’s track record has been spotty but, as the Beasties would say, this one smells like sabotage

SpaceX is going to be buried by Honda... the tech startup model is not conductive to developing complex engineering systems that MUST work safely and reliably.

I think it's a very visible metaphor for very rich people and corporations being able to treat the world like a toilet after a roadside burrito with little to no blowback.

New I-69 billboard just dropped: [photo of the explosion] “RENOVATED: Bidets at Buc-ees!”

Well rockets are supposed to explode, only the explosion is supposed to go out one end instead of all directions at once

Maybe it was a test run of the bomb from Dark Star?

Teach it phenomenology.

I bet Eric Berger is sad.

Waste, fraud, and abuse

It was all going extremely well until it blew up.

There was fire and parts of it went into space, what more can you ask for!

Better drug test him again

Can we get crypto or AI to fix this? Seems like we should try.

It's not like rocket science is rocket science...

I am so sick of that stupid phrase at this point. "Move fast and break things" is an absolutely idiotic ethos and people just parroting it every time a tech moron fucks things up is absolutely maddening.

Well that’s OK because “move fast and break things” has evolved into “don’t go anywhere and explode.”

Even from its outset it was idiotic because what it's essentially saying is "gloss over the foundational work in the name of chasing the appearance of innovation". Which is dumb because it gets bored of the actually important part, meaning any "innovation" it does will be shallow and unstable

Some dork: “No, you don’t get it: they’ve never had a reusable rocket before!” Me:

Right, but fishing it out the water and having the factory clean and rebuild it is not the same thing as they have been trying (and failing) to do ?

Correct, but the dorks should be more precise in how they write about these things.

“SpaceX were the first to build a space craft that could land and take off again” en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_l...

(I know it’s not exactly the same thing since the purpose is different but still: NASA were basically doing this in the 60s)

Also, rockets that explode before liftoff technically aren’t usable, never mind reusable!

Dude, they learned so much from this, you just don’t understand.

Waiting for the people who explain that, actually, putting all of the fuel storage and explosive stuff next to where you test explosives and rocket boosters is good and a proper way to go about things.

Average Rhodesian idea

I get having like the first few test rockets blow up but this is the THIRTY-SIXTH TEST This shit will never be fucking approved by NASA to shuttle crew even if they get it to stop blowing up, its track record is so horribly tainted by this point

Sometimes rockets, like electric cars, just explode while they’re sitting there doing nothing. Perfectly natural, even beautiful in its own way

🎶Once the rocket blows up, Who cares what it was for? That's not my department Says Elon the Boer🎶

I'd sooner sit in the MythBusters rocket chair.

Seems like ULA gets along just fine without theirs "working" this way

Because Elon is a fraud and has no idea what he is doing.

Musk did say he was going to dismantle his space ship right?

Move Fast and Self-Disassemble

If Iran has taught me anything it is Rockets go best when they go boom.

They're setting standards, just not in the way they had expected.

Even the Rocket Science for Babies books show the rocket GOING somewhere. The last page occurs IN SPACE. I could have run a Texas-county-wide community mental health program FOR A YEAR for what that rocket cost. With competitive wages. Fuck you, Elon.

Only big and beautiful rockets.

Making excuses for rockets exploding when it's the 9th iteration of a rocket is wild

Only 9th? I doubt that.

i think they are confusing rockets (for space) with rockets (for war crimes)

If NASA had blown up this many rockets at any point, congress would have shut them down in 1963.

SpaceX is skipping the completely unnecessary step of learning from what happened.

I like this so much more than when my tax dollars were paying to successfully put people into space... Nasa figured out how to not blow up rockets in the fucking 60s, how is SpaceX so bad at this?

Move fast and break things make a lot more sense when your product is a widget. A lot less when it is several thousand tons of solid rocket fuel

Even then, it depends on the purpose of the widget. Consumer safety and the move fast and break things model dont align well

Flux capacitor was used in a future spacecraft...

it actually felt really good for the rocket when it did that

Rockets only do this when they’re in a lot of distress and frightened!

And a special guest appearance by Sometimes They Just Do That!

The way rockets dress causes explosions

What was the rocket wearing?

It appeared to be a shiny grey form fitting number, it was very sleek highlighting all its attributes

Well the explodium just can't control itself when it sees something like that. You know how it is.

*nods* explodiums will be explodiums

Even the actual Nazis, busy kinda inventing this technology while getting their asses kicked in a war, had a much better success rate. (ignoring for the moment what “success” meant)

I'm going to start telling parents their kid will be a rocket scientist as an insult.

Rockets actually only do that when they're VERY upset.

It's very good and cool that the brain genius who managed to regress rocket science by 60 years was in charge of making our already undersized federal government smaller for the sake of 'efficiency'

"Move fast and break things" is techbro speak for "I don't know why things are done that way so I'm not going to do it and OH MY GOD THAT'S WHY IT'S DONE THAT WAY NOBODY COULD HAVE FORESEEN THIS DISASTER!"

It's a tech bro misunderstanding of rapid test cycles. You don't *want* things to break but sometimes you don't know if they'll break or not until you get the thing out

All techbros think they're smarter than everyone else. To them, if *they* don't know why a process exists, then *nobody* must know why it exists. So they get rid of it. And then find out exactly why that process was put in place. Look at them begging for crypto regs after SBF scammed them all.

Just the regulations to protect their investment though! Nothing stopping them from pumping out their OWN memecoin bag swaps!

Yeah the point of "throw stuff at a wall and see what sticks" isn't "we want stuff to fall off the wall" it's "we want to weed out the bad options so we can focus on the good ones"

This makes a lot of sense when you consider their engineers probably learned how to build rockets from watching Twitch streamers play Kerbal Space Program.

That would certainly explain the failure rate.

Explosion during what was apparently still fueling is a truly strange anomaly and, superficially, I'd say might reflect on something other than the flight hardware, which may have had nothing at all to do with this

"sabotage" one option Or some truly profound test processing mistake Again none of the flight hardware that hasn't performed well would be involved in this -- offhand, completely separate kind of problem

They are quite literally blowing up our tax dollars in our faces. Either as dumbass elon rockets or dumbass missiles to genocide brown kids. But healthcare is out of the question because there is somehow no money to pay for it

Although rocket science was a bit more experimental when the soviets and NASA blew up thiers

I wish I knew how rockets are supposed to work, or at least what the heck they did to blow it up. NASA did burn an Apollo crew and two shuttles but over like 50 years not almost double digit failures in 5

Well if it doesn't catch fire, how is it a static fire test? 🤪

I've defended explosions before.

😂 bsky.app/profile/badg...

well, I am no expert, but they ARE designed to create a lot of fire & explosiony kind of stuff, right? But it usually comes out of the bottom of it I think.

Maybe we shouldn't "move fast and break things" if it's gonna result in a bunch of accidental fiery explosions

Y'all, I'm starting to think I shouldn't have bought that plot of land on Mars he promised me

Totally normal for a company to spend more money on a failure than it would cost to feed a lot of hungry children, bro do you even rocket?

Living up to the tradition of fascists developing new modes of transportation.

Safety systems are expensive and essential. Something SpaceX and Tesla does not have.

There is way more data all over the launch site now than if it had been successful

My Dad was a rocket engineer. Worked on the lunar landing module for Apollo 11. They, at best, had rudimentary computers and slide rules. But they made it to the moon. With astronauts. Who returned. Musk is a joke.

The primary computer on the Apollo 11 was a fucking miracle of technology. If memory serves, it ran several virtual computers inside its memory which considering my watch has more processing power these days is a trip to think about.

The calculations were done by women and adding machines. That's it. That's all they had. And they had women because the men considered themselves "too important" to do that kind of work. I mean, they were very eminent mathematicians, but they were still given the "worst" tasks.

Through the 90s I met a number of boomer men who physically recoiled from touching a keyboard. Was dying to tell them it wouldn't make them gay to hit "alt-tab." So odd to see.

I was thinking specifically of the AGC whose development was headed by Margaret Hamilton.

Rockets exploding upon ignition Irish car bomb style eliminates fraud and waste!

the whole 'move fast break shit' ethos does NOT apply to all things - you know - like government - or rocket design i would think

From what I've seen, it only applies to things one wants ruined. The money & faith given to tech was clearly squandered.

duh, every space program has a quota of sacrifices that must be made to stolas, the great prince of hell, in exchange for the knowlege of astronomy that allows us to go to space

Passed the fire test...

"That's not my department"

Well, that’s one way to decommission a spacecraft.

Neither the US nor the USSR had a 90% failure rate. The single Starship that didn't blow up didn't even make a full Earth orbit. Nobody cares that Musk gets $8 million an hour from US tax payers, while delivering this.

The rocket program that preceded the US and Soviet programs did... Perhaps he's trying to emulate them.

They have indeed moved fast and broken things bigly.

I mean rockets *do* blow up a lot. But also maybe Soace X isn't so great at the thing it does for a living? 🤷‍♂️ two-things-can-be-true, etc.

They certainly have the “break shit” part down pat, the “move fast” part not so much. Maybe Elon should concentrate on the “move fast” part of rockets?

Also, everyone saying “Move fast and break things” without understanding that the whole point was that the broken things would quickly be unbroken. Blowing up massively expensive rockets is not the same thing as a website rollout.

i blame the metric system.

Just checked out the ongoing livestream and a lot of nervous chatter about the things they’ll learn from this to help improve the rocket going forward

What's really wild is that Starship has no way for the crew to escape in an emergency and so has to be basically airliner reliable if it's going to be used for crewed missions.

Look at all that data!

You’d think after almost a century we’d be improving our system that actually worked instead of using AI to reinvent the wheel and blow shit up. Musk is a fucking weapon of destruction.

It’s a shame, you’d think it’d be okay to learn everything about rocket science from one showing of “October Sky” you watched sixteen years ago.

Honda must not know that they're doing. Their rocket yesterday didn't even explode a little bit!

I think rockets only work when you hire competent nazis to work on them.

Deep State operatives are responsible don't you know!

Here's a super helpful post about how to go to space today: xkcd.com/1133

Elon has joined the war on Kessler syndrome on the side of Kessler syndrome

Generally to get to Kessler syndrome the debris needs to be made in orbit, not on the launchpad. But clearly this is a bold new strategy on his part, because could the richest man in the world be a complete and utter fucking moron?

with a small investment of 200 billion dollars from the US government, inshallah the next Spaceship will explode in low orbit

I'm not sure the Soviets or NASA made it so routine to blow up rockets to the point that it was fully expected every time they attempted to launch.

And it's important to note that rockets were relatively new then. Today we have decades of successful launches and lots of data on what works and what doesn't. To have so many failures today is in my view a lot worse than when rockets were still a new technology.

Not since the 50's... So Make Rockets Explode Again? They're so obsessed to returning to the good old days...

Back in my day when you had a rocket it was supposed to explode not go to space

Early rocketry was pretty much non-stop explosions

Well, there was the N1. But that was because they were making it on a shoestring budget and the best testing pipeline they could afford very much was "we launch and see what happens".

The difference between historical and what Elon is doing, that if a rocket blew up a couple of times, you canceled the rocket. How many failures has this been for Starship

Let me explain…

Elon wants to distribute his rocketry amongst the people, in the most efficient way possible. We should be thankful that the billionaire deigned to bless us plebs with sophisticated rocketry, Robert. Trickle-down space exploration

I guess I am qualified for SpaceX rocket Engineer after all. Thanks Linkedln.

They're supposed to go up and you shouldn't use them when you've been drinking. Probably more them than that, but those are the two most important things to remember.

Oh? “No smoking during fueling” didn’t make the list?

I mean... if you're a nerd, maybe. I say smoke em if you got em.

That said: rockets are way more fun when you're drunk.

I first saw the news from Tim Onion and thought it was a joke. Until now.

They got so much DATA! Data everywhere! Raining from the sky! Burning up the launch pad! The data! So! much! DATAAAAA! (lol)

That one's been so reliable! But unlike in the original comment here, this one actually blew up BEFORE the test. There is no data this time to yell about.

But isn't 'no data' also, in itself, a kind of data? Checkmate.

"In this report, we have modified our goals to instead study the null condition for a rocket launch."

🤣

they will be picking up the data out of the engines of downed airliners before long

You see, moving fast and breaking things is much more fun than moving slightly slower and staying intact.

I remember the Apollo program. Zero Saturn Fives blew up. Let alone sitting on the pad waiting for a static test.

Rocket, go up. If rocket no go up is bomb not rocket, this is the end of my ted talk

rockets only do that when they're very stressed out and anxious

It's true that SpaceX drove its way to industry dominance on a road paved with exploded parts, but at this point the new rocket isn't even making any forward progress. Maybe it's too big to be workable, being sized by ego rather than by demand.

Being 400 feet tall makes it very difficult for it to be light enough, powerful enough, and robust enough all at the same time. The solution would be to make it smaller, which Elon won't accept.

Spacex wants these things to be as mass producible as possible, which is a problem when the engineer requirement for some of the things, with the size of this rocket, probably are going to be more expensive. Prohibitively so. Like he wants to go to Mars by I think 5 years ago at this point

I mean, he doesn’t really want to go to Mars. He just wants to be seen as some humanity saving messiah figure. Promising to colonize another planet gets him that adoration without having to actually accomplish much of anything.

And there’s no plan for radiation shielding because he doesn’t think it’ll be a problem.

You mean "Mr eugenics" wants to make everyone on his Mars mission sterile?

..... *headdesk* I hate all of them so much.

They've just been large stacks of TNT this whole time. Checkmate liberal.

Check out the Common Sense Skeptic series on Starship on YT.

Can’t wait to jump into one of Elon‘s driverless taxis.

One day mankind will go to space

They only do this when they are extremely distressed

"This kind of experience is necessary for her learning." 😁🎵🔥 music.youtube.com/watch?v=fbU1...

✨efficiency✨

This is part of a $4b NASA contract to land a crewed mission on the moon. We literally paid for every dime of this. What is this now? 5 of the last 9 Starships? With only two more Hohmann orbit launch windows before 2030?

Are you saying that private enterprise isn't being more efficient than a well funded and carefully planned government initiative?

Heresy!

St. Reagan is shaking his head.

to be that guy, it’s not true that we paid for every dime of this. the 4 billion dollars is exclusively for the HLS lander variant and tied to milestones. Starship itself is mostly private cash and they’ve already spent 5-10 billion dollars of it.

No, thank you for the correction. I assumed booster and lander were the same contract.

Elon obviously learned from the last 3. Those all blew up mid-air. NOW, they blow up on the ground.

It _is_ a much smaller debris field.

Pro tip for Elon Musk: Let Grok design the next iteration of Starship. Please AI is the future, RIGHT ELON?

you know we had a good thing going with the saturn V rocket

It's basically premature ejaculation for rockets and we don't need to worry, it just happens sometimes

it made sense for the rockets to blow up earlier but those problems are supposed to end and then if they start up again from a different problem in an unrelated system where as starship...just keeps blowing up elon just cant handle build quality it seems

not to belabor the point but this is literally the same core problem as what feynman said about Challenger which, as most people do not remember, was actually going up in part because reagan wanted to commercialize the space program and get rid of nasa

"Now ideally - and I can't stress this enough - you want that explosion coming out of the bottom of your rocketship rather than the top, middle, and sides..."

I mean, *really*, this IS the description of a rocket engine; John D. Clark mentions this quite a bit in "Ignition!".

Lol

It’s literally the xkcd joke lol

Easy to forget. I won’t Monday quarterback.

This is how I want any rocket with Musk or Bezos on it to work

After that, they can explain why it's good actually to put dozens of fuel tanks right next to where the rockets blow up

no space to put it further back. the whole site is 4-5 little outposts all surrounded by protected wetlands. the logic is probably that ground explosions aren’t supposed to happen and if they do, the damage to the stand is a bigger problem than replacing some pretty cheap fuel tanks

This was a static fire test? Did this happen during assembly or after countdown? Asking because there are a lot of people working on the pads during assembly. Is everyone accounted for?

Everyone is OK according to SpaceX www.valleycentral.com/news/local-n...