Summary
SpaceX’s Starship spacecraft exploded in space minutes after launching from Texas, marking the second consecutive failure this year.
The rocket spun uncontrollably before breaking apart, with debris seen over Florida and the Bahamas. The cause remains unclear, though multiple engines shut down before contact was lost.
The failure raises concerns about setbacks in Elon Musk’s Mars rocket program. The FAA temporarily halted flights at major Florida airports due to falling debris.
A similar Starship failure in January scattered wreckage over the Caribbean.
“The cause remains unclear” lmao
As if everyone on the livestream couldn’t see the fire in the engine bay, the exact problem that blew up the last rocket too.
Obviously the fire suppression failed again and it caused an energetic failure in one or more engines, flinging Starship into a rapid spin. It held on for, I dunno, 30 seconds to a minute, until they sent the kill command.
The cause is Elon incompetence., edit : his incompetence in ideas and scheduling pressure.
I don’t think he’s terribly involved at SpaceX these days. Other than causing schedule pressure… which certainly may have caused this failure by not giving the engineers proper time to research and fix the issue from the previous launch.
Ive had passing experience with Musks leadership. They make top down demands, like “I dont care, I want a demo of this tomorrow”. To get to that demo you cut every imagineable corner and show them a potempkin product the next day that is insanely fragile. And then they make a similar demand the next day, and the next. Then later on they ask why the product sucks.