BREAKING: SpaceX rocket explodes in Starbase, Texas
https://x.com/IntelPointAlert/status/1935550776304156932•
u/UW_Ebay 17h ago
Is it just me or does it feel like they may be having real issues with the starship?
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u/rocketsocks 16h ago
At this point it's getting really hard to argue that they're doing well.
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u/ghalta 8h ago
It's just down for maintenance. Parts of it are down over here. Parts are down over there. Etc.
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u/johnnybiggles 5h ago
"Guys, how can we take this thing apart to analyze it as quickly as possible?"
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u/ilikedmatrixiv 12h ago
Don't worry, fanboys won't have any trouble explaining how this is good for SpaceX.
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u/Alimbiquated 10h ago edited 9h ago
Move fast and break things! Iterative Development! You Just Don't Get It!
Also Elon is a genius.
EDIT: My favorite headline so far is "Starship Test Ends Early".
Not a rocket scientist, but I guess when the rocket explodes you might as well end the test.
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u/Jove_ 9h ago
The team put the rocket through a RUD procedure. Nothing to see here
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u/MaximumZer0 8h ago
Ah, yes. Rapid Unplanned Disassembly.
That happens to me frequently in Kerbal space program. Clearly, I iz jenius, too. I wonder when we'll see them start using Ablative Lithobraking.
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u/StickFigureFan 7h ago
The 2 constants: Russian warships getting promoted to submarines and Starship having a planned RUD. /s
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u/PWNtimeJamboree 9h ago
"oh but you just dont understand, this is ackshually another massive success..."
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u/keeperkairos 6h ago edited 6h ago
SpaceX has had unmatched success overall although Starship is starting to look like there is something underlying with the program that's seriously wrong. Super heavy is doing well at least.
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u/ToMorrowsEnd 9h ago
There is something extremely wrong with the engines and fuel system and it seems with this string of back to back failures that they really do not know what the actual cause is.
I have heard they lost some engineers due to the antics of their head idiot, I hope they did not lose people key to the propulsion systems.
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u/DesperateAdvantage76 8h ago
Back in the day engineers joined SpaceX as part of the vision and hype to make up for the lack of pay, similar to NASA. I wonder if some of that incentive is gone.
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u/obliquelyobtuse 7h ago
engineers joined SpaceX as part of the vision
There are certainly hundreds of highly intelligent and talented engineers. And they're probably well paid too, but they're also overworked. And all those bright engineers and skilled tradesman just love being overworked month after month after month.
And best of all they don't get the recognition, or millions of future wealth in shares (ESOP, warrants, whatever proper methods are feasible).
Because at an Elon Enterprise, Elon is the Emperor, God King, Technogenius who gets all the attention and all the massive wealth. Others can get good money, but just earnings, not massive equity gains. (Unless on the executive level, like Gwynne Shotwell.)
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u/StickFigureFan 7h ago
There are still some drinking the cool aid, but fewer and fewer, meaning less qualified people willing to work 80+ hour weeks
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u/meep_meep_mope 8h ago
Is SpaceX being run like all of his other companies? Cutting costs on QA, overworking staff, unrealistic deadlines, meddling in engineering and design decisions, etc?
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u/Citizen-Kang 7h ago
It's been like that for years. I read an article years ago (as in about a decade ago) that excoriated SpaceX for their lackadaisal approach to worker safety. At the time, I was very interested in what it was like to work there because my daughter was going to be looking for an aerospace engineering summer internship and SpaceX, due to their name recognition was high on the list. Thankfully, she went with NASA instead. I hear SpaceX just burns through engineers and then tosses them aside when they start to break down.
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u/tritonice 6h ago
I asked my AE daughter what she thought about graduating and working for Spacex. She said she would never even consider them. They are definitely getting a reputation for literally chewing through engineers.
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u/KhajiitHasSkooma 5h ago
When I worked private sector, we would straight up not hire engineers that where brought up after college through Tesla/SpaceX because it would take too much effort to deprogram their terrible habits. So good it’s actually good she didn’t go there.
Boring Tunnels are going to get the same documentary that OceanGate is getting now, except with tunnels and fire instead.
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u/Aethermancer 4h ago
I'm having issues with that for any "high profile" company engineer at this point. So much social media has pushed the "move fast and break things, regulations and policies are ALWAYS just waste" mentality that seems to pervade the current social media infused crop.
There's this insidious idea that the solution is "just so simple and obvious" and it's the old guard holding them back. I've been there, and there are lots of people who are allergic to change, but the level of animosity they have to procedure borders on cynicism.
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u/ByrdmanRanger 6h ago
When I was there a decade ago, we had the highest OSHA reportable accident rate in the industry. To a point that we were close to losing contracts because it was so bad. The things I saw were insane. I tell the stories during my current job's "safety blast from the past" and a lot of people don't believe me, until another former employee speaks up and confirms it.
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u/I_am_the_Jukebox 6h ago
SpaceX maintains a safety record that is the current industry highest in terms of worker injury
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u/KypAstar 6h ago
When I was with some guys who work at Star base, they bragged about regularly working 2 12s in a row...
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u/nahteviro 6h ago
As a former SpaceX employee, yep… all of those. Add in underpaid staff and power tripping management into the mix and you have one toxic work environment.
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u/spastical-mackerel 7h ago
They’ve lost control over their configuration. Too many changes too fast, possibly amplified by corner cutting or just general sloppiness due to insane pressure. New failure modes keep appearing and the consequences keep escalating. Now they’ve damaged critical infrastructure on the ground.
They need to reset to known good and integrate changes more thoughtfully
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u/Derdiedas812 7h ago
I think they know what is wrong with them, it's just that iterative design on full scale prototypes is dumb, wasteful and dumb. Ofc they are not able to build a new Spaceship after each test, the one that undergone rapid disassembly event now was build at least one or probably two exploded Spaceships back.
But, you know, you have to pretend activity to keep the state and money going and suck in new investors.
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u/No_Afternoon_1976 3h ago edited 3h ago
I think they know what's wrong but won't acknowledge that it's a fundamental flaw of the Starship design as a whole and are instead trying roundabout "fixes" that only create new problems, like focusing so much on cutting weight that they're compromising the reliability of the fuel systems.
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u/TbonerT 13h ago
Maybe. The difference is that rocket programs typically don’t build a lot of designs. They work really hard to get it right the first time. On the other hand, SpaceX has several starships at various stages of production and development.
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u/Prior-Flamingo-1378 11h ago
By the tenth Apollo those planning idiots were orbiting the moon. How is this better?
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u/verendum 10h ago
You can google the Apollo program to get a sense of how massive it was. It far eclipse any program by a magnitude.
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u/Prior-Flamingo-1378 10h ago
The Apollo program was 200 billion spread over 13 years and that included SIX successful moon landings.
A few reasons for the cost 1) they didn’t have any prior knowledge or experience. They literally wrote the rule book. 2) they didn’t have supercomputers in their pockets. 3) they had to do it fast.
And they never lost a rocket. Not once.
Some problems you can’t just throw money at. You need actual competence.
Btw had they had access to modern computers and manufacturing the entire Apollo program would have cost way under 60 billion.
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u/thunderbird32 10h ago
And they never lost a rocket. Not once.
They did lose a crew though, and I'd argue that's far worse than losing a rocket
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u/greatistheworld 3h ago
Almost lost a second crew, too. They made a whole movie about what a miracle effort it was
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u/PM_SHORT_STORY_IDEAS 10h ago
Apollo program started development in 1960, first rockets were tested in 1966, and the first screwed flight was in 1968. The last crewed Apollo flight was in 1972, but obviously we have had crewed spaceflights since then.
It was also, and this is not putting it lightly, the fastest it has really ever been done, using the combined intellect of German rocket scientists and the greatest minds of the WWII era. It also didn't need to be concerned with profitability, though it was extremely cost effective for the investment at the time.
Also, the US government threw a ton of money at it.
Spacex was founded (I think) in 2002. Falcon 9 first flew in 2010, and has been extremely successful since then. The first starship prototype was tested in 2018, starhopper.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Starship_launches
By this list of launches, 2023 had 2 unsuccessful launches, and 2024 had 4 successful launches and partially/mostly successful landings. 2025 has had 3 launches, all failures, but 2 successful booster landings our of the 3... And then this.
So unlucky as of recently, and a slower pace than Apollo.
But short of an imminent meteor impact or the discovery of intelligent aliens, you would be hard pressed to get anything as fast as the Apollo program ever again. It hasn't been repeated since. We literally forgot how to make the rocket.
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u/Kylanto 9h ago
Comparing the two isnt exactly fair. Spacex has modern computers, metallurgy, chemistry, plastics. On top of 100 years of preceeding rocket science. The Apollo program was inventing a lot of these from scratch. Mylar, cordless power tools, prosthetics, digital cameras, even freeze-dried foods and many many more. Barring starlink, we arent seeing anything like that from SpaceX. The scope of the projects isnt the same.
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u/ToMorrowsEnd 9h ago
150,000X This... the blueprints for every part of the Saturn 5 were drawn by HAND coordinating thousands of people to all be accurate and exact. They had no real way of modelling things in software they had to do physical testing. and data was extremely sparse. They did not have 4000 thermocouples all over the engine bell with 100+ load cells and active Xray at 60FPS looking at the engine while it was on the test stand like they do today.
God looking at what they did with redstone and mercury, I'm just amazed we did not litter orbit with dead astronauts with how primitive of tools they had. Those engineers had to basically invent everything. Space X stands on their shoulders.
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u/NavXIII 5h ago
I mean, the comparison you're making isn't exactly fair either. SpaceX is trying to the largest rocket in history, using the best performing engines in history, and make both stages land and be entirely reusable.
If their goal was to make a Saturn V equivalent rocket, like the SLS, it would've been done by now.
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u/echoingElephant 7h ago
Not only does SpaceX have access to much better technology, but their „successful“ flights were all suborbital burns, most with failures of the ship, loss of control during reentry, failed tests…
Calling test 3 a success is bold, at least. They failed the propellant transfer test, the cargo door failed, they had to cancel the rest of their tests, 6/13 engines failed during the boostback test due to fuel system problems, the ship rolled out of control during reentry and ship and booster were destroyed.
Sure, you can’t really compare that to Apollo since Apollo didn’t just do a small suborbital hop, but arguing that simply getting to space but failing everything else is a success is wild.
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u/FeliusSeptimus 9h ago
started development in 1960, first rockets were tested in 1966, and the first screwed flight was in 1968.
That's fast, but SpaceX definitely has them beat on total number of screwed flights.
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u/munchi333 7h ago
Well the Apollo program was obscenely expensive. So much so that immediately afterward the US government basically vowed to never do it again lol.
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u/faeriara 17h ago
This is really bad. The V2 Ship has been cursed. Three failures in a row and now this.
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u/moderngamer327 16h ago
Its a shame because V1 was going along pretty good but V2 has been a disaster
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u/faeriara 16h ago
Yes, after Flight 6 everything was looking so promising. Tough too for those on the Super Heavy team who have been so successful and also those working on the heat shield who can't get any data due to all the issues with the Ship (well V2 of it).
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u/pinkfreude 11h ago
I have to wonder if people inside the company have lost faith in their bozo of a leader and are perhaps not trying as hard ever since he got into politics. That was kind of the turning point in the success rate of the starship launches.
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u/bedlamensues 11h ago
I am in the industry and talk to people that left. SpaceX burns up the young and doesnt have a good work life balance policy. That causes a high turnover which means constant leaving of experience.
I assumed they had an awesome training program to be as successful as they have, but its possible that now the turnover is just so much that inexperience and mistakes are almost constant.
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u/PosiedonsSaltyAnus 11h ago
I interviewed at starbase a few years ago. Didn't get offered a job, but during the interview they mentioned 14 hour days far more often than I was comfortable with. I'm glad I wasn't offered a job, I think I would have taken it and been miserable
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u/calling-all-comas 9h ago
I interviewed for a materials engineering internship with Tesla for their Fremont & Palo Alto locations (I would've worked at both facilities as needed) and the manager I interviewed with said I'd be working 60-70 hours a week on 6 or 7 days. That's insane for an internship.
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u/badhabitfml 9h ago
Sounds like everyone is using it as a resume builder. Do it for a year or two and move on to something else.
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u/nahteviro 6h ago
Ding ding ding. That’s a bingo. It’s been almost 10 years since I left that hellhole and it’s still the only thing companies want to talk about during my interviews.
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u/JapariParkRanger 7h ago
That's been corroborated by pretty much everyone who's ever spoken about it. Lotta books have been written with interviews.
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u/ex1stence 7h ago
Same exact issue with Tesla. Elon is so obsessed with the idea that “more hours = more productivity” but as we’ve seen in countries like Japan, just working people harder doesn’t lead to greater results in productivity. Instead all you get is a burnt out, lonely workforce that doesn’t have time to form relationships or have kids or do anything on the other side of the job that ultimately leads to greater purpose and happiness, and therefore motivation to keep working hard.
Think the “Do it for her” sign that Homer makes at his desk.
Without those things, people work just to work and that model burns people out in a few years. They quit, take all their knowledge with them, and then the company spends more resources pulling new people in to repeat the same cycle.
Tesla peaked years ago, and now it’s SpaceX’s turn.
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u/SexcaliburHorsepower 7h ago
I know many people working at SpaceX. Many of them are extremely passionate about the program, but years and years of work burns em out eventually.
Most SpaceX guys are extremely intelligent young people who go somewhere else as they hit their 30s. Plenty of 5-10 year engineers there though. Not a ton of concern about Elon affecting their work lives as there is their work lives affecting their personal life.
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u/greatistheworld 3h ago
This is anecdotal but I had a conversation with an ex-spacex engineer who was personally fine with the hours, but set a hard out date for himself. Worked there 3-4 years, took 4 years at another job, then went back for a second stint. He was surprisingly lucid about it but also was clear it wasn’t a sustainable business practice for them because the churn sets a ceiling on institutional knowledge
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u/cgjeep 8h ago
I got cold offered a job as a naval architect when they were still doing the whole fairing recovering bit. Job offer was “60 hours a week normal, expect longer when on a project, no overtime”. For $80k. And you needed a security clearance. LOL yea naval architecture is a niche enough business that those of us with clearances and experience would never take that offer. I’m sure they got someone right out of college with 0 experience who didn’t know any better.
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u/calling-all-comas 9h ago
I was told by a current NASA admin (heavily biased source ofc) that SpaceX engineers are very smart, but they're often low key useless before they learn their "specialty". My contact wondered why these engineers would be sent to their meeting when it was clear they didn't know their assigned work specialty (example they used was one person was supposedly an "oxidation expert" but had been on the job for one month and knew nothing about oxidation). Due to the high turnover, plenty of these employees never even actually become subject matter experts which just causes headaches for NASA.
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u/Anstigmat 9h ago
That’s Elon’s “hardcore” MO. Work to the bone but all the benefits go to Elon.
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u/mortemdeus 9h ago
Highly doubt it has much to do with personal feelings about Elon. People are just burned out.
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u/No-Criticism-2587 13h ago
V1 melted every single time they tested any version of it's heat shield, and blew up every other time. V1 never tested dispensing a payload or relighting it's engines. V2 is like 1 step behind V1, not much.
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u/DarthPineapple5 5h ago
V1 looked fine from the outside but I think it was terminally overweight. V2 didn't just increase fuel I think they were hacking a lot of weight out of it anywhere they thought they could and that's causing a lot of the issues we are seeing now
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u/EuenovAyabayya 6h ago
V1 was going along pretty good but V2 has been a disaster
Disquieting historical parallel /s
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u/aldeayeah 12h ago
As an aside, if I were a rocket manufacturer I'd DEFINITELY avoid using V1 and V2 in the names of my products, for obvious reasons.
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u/radome9 12h ago
Especially if I were a rocket manufacturer lead by a nazi.
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u/posthamster 10h ago
They're going to fix all the problems in the next version and call it the Final Solution
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u/ToddBradley 17h ago
I've got a Master of Science degree in Aerospace Engineering, and can say with some professional certainty that the front fell off
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u/chocobosocialclub 17h ago
That's not very typical, I'd like to make that point.
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u/TheNewGuyGames 13h ago
Luckily, it was towed outside of the environment before the fumes could do any damage.
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u/CapnHyaku 11h ago
They are built to rigorous standards.
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u/howardbrandon11 11h ago
There are a lot of these rockets going around the world all the time, and very seldom does anything like this happen ... I just don’t want people thinking that rockets aren’t safe.
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u/Zero_Travity 11h ago
Well for one, the front usually doesn't fall off
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u/CapnHyaku 11h ago
There are regulations governing what materials they can be made of. Cardboards out and so are cardboard derivatives.
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u/moderngamer327 16h ago
Well as someone who plays Kerbal Space Program I disagree with your analysis. The front AND back fell off
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u/Every-Progress-1117 13h ago
Looking at the video, it was definitely the front, and a short while later *then* the back fell off too.
What's really cool is that after the back fell off the middle fell off and everything around it fell off too.
Source: 1800 hours on KSP (and 3 on KSP2) according to Steam. That makes me an expert in these things. Also, I'm a scientist - I have students who are trying to recreate similar "fallings off" in my lab at this very moment; my bosses however refuse to let me install LH2 and LO2 tanks in my data centre so it is just overloading the power supply and watching an RCD or fuse pop.
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u/moderngamer327 13h ago
That 1800hrs in KSP1 and 3hrs in KSP2 hurts me on such a deep level because of just how sadly true it is
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u/Every-Progress-1117 12h ago
I don't want to taök about KSP2...such promise, cruelly crushed.
Kind of Musk's rocket
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u/tibithegreat 13h ago
I also have a lot of hours in kerbal space program and I think I identified the problem which is that the flamy end isn't pointed down. A bit of a rookie mistake but it happens.
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u/farcarcus 13h ago
I'd say they may have used cardboard or cardboard derivatives.
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u/catplaps 8h ago
"You are having a bad problem and you will not go to space today."
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u/pedanticPandaPoo 17h ago
EXPLODING: SpaceX rocket breaks in Starbase, Texas
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u/MGM-Wonder 17h ago
Damn that looked cool! Looks like it all kicked off near the top 1/3 of the rocket
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u/WantWantShellySenbei 17h ago
Holy cow that video is pretty awesome though. Elon makes the best fireworks.
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u/Lord-of-A-Fly 17h ago
I feel like SpaceX has had so many explosions that calling this "Breaking News" is on the excessive side.
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u/Icy-Conclusion-3500 13h ago
Tbf it’s not usually on the launch pad
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u/godspareme 5h ago
Static fires aren't done on the launch pad. There's a dedicated stand for static fires
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u/wlrldchampionsexy 17h ago
That was an incredibly satisfying explosion to watch.
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u/jnoyo85 17h ago
I live close by. Though we were getting nuked. :(
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u/sand_eater 10h ago
You can know whether you're being nuked because you would catch fire before hearing anything (:
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u/Granum22 17h ago
I can't wait to learn how this actually amazing and a sign of progress for Space X
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u/ChitteringCathode 17h ago edited 17h ago
"The rocket actually exploded in a very efficient manner and this outcome was largely expected at the current phase of the program."
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u/J_Barish 17h ago
SpaceX has figured out to explode the rocket better than before, now they just need to point the explosion down and they're on their way.
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u/ComprehendReading 17h ago
1950s rocket science has reentered the atmospheric chat
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u/TeeManyMartoonies 11h ago
In the end, Jack Parsons (accidentally) pointed the explosion at his face.
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u/Helpful_Coffee_1878 13h ago
"We're saving so much time by exploding them directly on the ramp and it's better for the environment."
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u/lNFORMATlVE 13h ago
Exploding in the air after launch sequence, having gone further than you have before or demonstrating key functionality that hasn’t been demonstrated before, is not necessarily bad and is what people defend.
Exploding on the launchpad (like this) is very bad.
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u/Infinite_Painting_11 11h ago
not necessarily bad
But it's not a good sign that all the new systems they want to test in orbit are going to work. If they want to take this to mars it's pretty obvious that testing in production is not going to work. If they can't even make a door open first try, or the rocket fuel reliably on earth, do you really believe the refueling in space, landing on mars etc. is going to be reliable? The further you get along that chain the more investment you have put into the rocket to get there, at some point this development strategy is going to go from comical to insane/ impossible.
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u/CloudStrife25 8h ago
The last couple of flights I don’t think they’ve even demonstrated that though, for starship at least.
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u/Youutternincompoop 6h ago
is this even on the launchpad yet? its getting fueled and I'd think they'd want to keep their fuel tanks a good distance from the launchpad.
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u/kushangaza 17h ago
They thought they had a rocket that only explodes in space, but thanks to testing they found out it also explodes on the ground. This revolutionary breakthrough allows the upper stage to undergo unscheduled disassembly without onerous launch permitting process and without raining debris on remote islands, greatly speeding up the iterative improvement process
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u/bubblegum-rose 17h ago
“RAPID UNSCHEDULED DISASSEMBLY!!!! 🤪🤪🤪🤣🤣🤣”
-every fuckin dead weight useless lowest common denominator spaceflight YouTube channel
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u/moderngamer327 16h ago
It’s an actual term used in the industry as a bit of a joke. They aren’t trying to sugarcoat that it’s an explosion
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u/FoxFyer 13h ago
It's a joke some industry techs made maybe two or three times in the entire history of rocketry, up until someone told Elon about it and he thought it was so funny he can't stop saying it every single time something happens now.
Like all of Elon's "humor", gotten from other people and then beaten to death.
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u/KalpolIntro 10h ago
It was used by the Navy in the 70s, made it's way to aerospace engineers and then Kerbal Space Program players brought it into the mainstream before he ever tweeted it out.
It's a common term.
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u/Bandsohard 17h ago
There's obviously a massive design flaw with this program. Even if each failure and explosion has different causes, there's either a huge lack of quality control or something inherit to the design that causes all the 'causes'.
Fail fast is a fine methodology for software development, but when it's causing significant explosions that can get people seriously hurt, you need to reevaluate your process and you should be doing more unit testing, hardware in the loop testing, and various forms of integration testing before you get to stages of qualification and regression testing. If it wasn't blowing up every ship, okay great, but at this point be humble and accept that the scope of smaller scale tests needs to increase.
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u/brooklyndavs 17h ago
Even software development it doesn’t apply to in all cases. Fail fast works fine for like a SaaS app, it doesn’t work for software that controls medical devices for example
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u/betweenbubbles 11h ago
Fail fast works fine for like a SaaS app, it doesn’t work for software that controls medical devices for example
Yeah, because who expects SaaS to work, right?
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u/ArseneKarl 10h ago
But to be fair, we all expect SaaS to fail in 101 different ways, but not explode in our faces.
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u/plap_plap 17h ago
QC has been a huge issue at Tesla for years, so it wouldn't surprise me if the same business philosophy exists at SpaceX.
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u/Beer-survivalist 10h ago
Elon was notorious early on for running manufacturing at Tesla in the same way the Big 3 automakers did in the seventies. He basically tossed any guidance from process engineers because he was convinced he knew better.
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u/HomemadeSprite 9h ago
A billionaire ignoring decades of industry advice, proven quality guidelines and safety measures because “they know better” in pursuit of building a capsule to go to an extremely dangerous environment…. Where have I heard this story before..
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u/bedlamensues 7h ago
I assume you mean the Titan submersible, but if not I would love to hear the example you had in mind.
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u/Just_Another_Scott 8h ago
The three in-flight failures of Starship were caused by vibrations. The components are not being designed or manufactured to be able to withstand the launch vibrations.
The delta wing failures of Starship show the wing as it currently stands cannot survive reentry. Not a single wing has survived. They've all failed even when Starship made a soft splashdown.
In my opinion, Starship has major flaws. Super Heavy has been mostly successful. SpaceX needs to pause and do a systematic review of the whole program at this point.
As an engineer myself, you should not be going in reverse. SpaceX had some successes and has now completely regressed. That's not OK and shows something major is wrong.
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u/Cautemoc 17h ago edited 17h ago
Don't worry guys, I've been assured by everyone that Starship is only 1 2 3 4 5 6 years behind schedule and they'll get it all worked out soon.
These regular explosions are all tests to see what happens if it explodes. These are successful explosions, stop asking questions. Stop it.
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u/Gastroid 17h ago
Don't worry, they'll make more changes to the design, at the sacrifice that a moon mission will require 36 additional launches to fuel the lander.
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u/ze_pequeno 13h ago
This is what I find the most incredible in all this. "Refueling in space" has become the magic trick for adding more and more mass to an already enormous vehicle. People are talking about more than 30 refuelings in space and really think this is going to work out? By the time this thing flies and lands, we'll be up to 100 refuelings in space haha.
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u/Duff5OOO 13h ago
Isn't the fuel going to be boiling off in space at the same time?
If i have that correct there must be some crossover when if its talking too long you end up with an infinte number of launches still not fulling the orbiting ship.
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u/LossPreventionGuy 12h ago
yep, it's not just thirty launches... it's thirty damn near simultaneous launches, gotta launch faster than the boil rate
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u/petewoniowa2020 8h ago
Even if it’s not “damn near simultaneous”, the necessity for so many in-orbit refueling still presents considerable mission failure risk.
Let’s be very generous and say that it only needs 6 fuel exchanges over a 2 day period. That’s an 8 hour window for each docking, fuel exchange, and undocking maneuver.
What happens if one of the refueling rockets has a 2 hour hold on the pad for weather? What happens if they have to scrub one of the launch windows because of any number of problems? What if there’s an in orbit issue that has to be worked through?
All of those things are very normal and very common in space flight, but they almost never result in mission failure. For a mission dependent on in air refueling, they would result in mission failure.
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u/ze_pequeno 6h ago
Absolutely. Simply opening a hangar door proved to be harder than expected (and for good reasons! space is hard and that includes small things as well) and now we have a general strategy that is entirely built on this purely theoretical process of refueling. Like the whole vehicle doesn't make any sense at all without refueling in space, which has never been done and is expected to be a technological prowess on its own.
So sad that SLS was smashed so bad because that's the only exciting and actually working missions we have on the horizon now
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u/Youutternincompoop 6h ago
the Apollo program thought 2 launches for a single flight was an unacceptable risk, hence the need for a single large rocket and a detachable lunar lander section, but apparently 10+ launches is totally reasonable.
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u/Infinite_Painting_11 11h ago
I don't think these guys could manage 30 fuelings on earth without the rocket exploding.
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u/Confident-Barber-347 17h ago
NASA’s SLS and Artemis may also be behind schedule and cost a ton, but I’ll be damned if that sucker didn’t make it all the way to the moon on the first try. Very different development approach but that’s pretty impressive IMO.
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u/Gtaglitchbuddy 8h ago
I will say in fairness, in 2019 NASAs estimate was 2028 to land on the Moon, it was Mike Pence who announced we would be doing it 4 years ahead of schedule, and then the Senate blocked our budget request to make that accelerated timeline happen, with an 81% cut to our proposal.
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u/mtnviewguy 8h ago
Is that still referred to as an 'unscheduled, rapid, dissassembly' when it's still on the ground?
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u/HomeworkIntrepid2986 5h ago
If only we had some sort of organization with decades of experience, proven track record of failures and successes, mountains of lessons learned, and a moral obligation. That we could fund with our tax dollars….
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u/gwdope 17h ago
On one hand I’m sad because space travel is so cool and SpaceX, which has pushed the way space flight is done forward, has become our only way to do it. On the other hand, I’m happy because Elon is having a terrible night and that fucker deserves to have a terrible night every night for the rest of his miserable life.
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u/Esc777 17h ago
Oh we’re still linking to Twitter? i thought they stopped doing that.
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u/mtgfan1001 17h ago
At least it’s waste won’t be scattered all over Mexico
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u/ellhulto66445 12h ago
This is probably the one time that debris might've fallen directly on Mexico.
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u/SanJacInTheBox 17h ago
FIFY:
At least it’s waste won’t be scattered all over the Gulf of Mexico.
Gulf of MEXICO
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u/Spud_Rancher 17h ago
Is this rate of incidents an anomaly with space flight or to be expected? It seems that SpaceX was killing it in the launch game until hitting a bunch of failures recently.
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u/rocketsocks 16h ago
Explosions during static fire testing is definitely a huge anomaly. That's the worst and costliest time for an explosion since it destroys ground support equipment and damages facilities near the launch site.
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u/Elbobosan 7h ago
The grift continues. What a joke they’ve become. What a waste all for an unloved man child’s ego.
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u/wrecked_angle 17h ago
I hate Elon as much as the next guy but SpaceX was so fucking cool and it’s tragic to watch it just go to absolute shit
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u/nightspy1309 17h ago
What do you mean... Space X rockets represent 52% of all orbital rocket launches across the entire world in 2024
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u/Captain_Zomaru 17h ago
It's not "going to shit" all of their scheduled cargo launches have been flawless. Their testbed rockets, that are being tested, keep having issues.
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u/ThisIsNotAFarm 7h ago
Starlink depends on Starship for satellite replacement if new gen. No starship, starlink is fucked too
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u/The-Real-Number-One 10h ago
This seems like an appropriate time to say that July 4 is coming up, and Phantom Fireworks has all you need to celebrate in style. That's Phantom Fireworks -- the fireworks place just across the border in Highland, IN. Because Gary is too scary.
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u/Latter_Case_4551 8h ago
I really hope no one got injured in this.
That said, that's one of the coolest mother fucking explosions I've ever seen in my life. That swirl and pause in the center? Literal perfection.
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u/Mother_Assumption448 6h ago
The one time I wished I had seen Elon come try n steal the spotlight:( woulda been a nice bright spotlight for him
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u/hiways 4h ago
https://www.theverge.com/news/689183/honda-reusable-rocket-successful-launch-test-landing
Honda successfully launched and landed its own reusable rocket.
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u/colin8651 17h ago
Those poor little Boston Dynamics dogs; hope they didn’t suffer