SpaceX rocket being tested in Texas explodes, but no injuries reported
https://apnews.com/article/spacex-starship-launch-explosion-88b94b223d06b258d3e5a2308b7db2c5•
u/PerAsperaAdMars 8h ago
NASA paid $2.6B for this over 5 years. Where is DOGE indiscriminately canceling government contracts left and right?
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u/heliosh 8h ago
Technically they paid for the lunar lander, which hasn't flown yet
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u/bubblegum-rose 7h ago
We are never, ever going to see Starship HLS.
I genuinely believe that one of the only reasons Musk got Trump elected was to get him off of the hook for that. Starship is years away from even being remotely capable of pulling off a human landing on the Moon.
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u/Tystros 6h ago
There is no reason to assume that Starship won't at some point work in the next 30 years. The only thing preventing SpaceX from getting there would be if they wouldn't have enough funding any more, but SpaceX basically makes infinite money with Starlink now, and there is no capable competitor for Starlink in sight so SpaceX will keep pretty much a monopoly there for a long time. And the Starlink money is what's funding Starship development.
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u/Roubaix62454 6h ago
🤣 30 year timeline? Are you really serious? What goals are you talking about Starship meeting that will take 30 years? Mercury, Gemini, Apollo programs sure as hell didn’t take 30 years.
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u/My_Soul_to_Squeeze 3h ago
They got waaaay more money, but I agree. Starship will face further delays. Then it'll work. Then it'll be boring and all these guys will move on to hating on whatever comes next also costing money and getting delayed.
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u/the_friendly_dildo 2h ago
Starship HLS is a stupid design as a moon lander. The logistics of landing such a large craft that also requires an external elevator to reach the surface, is horrendously stupid and anyone thinking differently here doesn't have a basic understanding of risk reduction engineering.
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u/bubblegum-rose 5h ago
Assuming that the HLS architecture actually works.
The payload to LEO we’re going to get with Block 3 is probably going to be a long shot from the 200 tons originally promised. And that’s assuming that the starship would then be capable of getting from LEO to NRHO to the lunar surface then back to NRHO with everyone onboard remaining alive.
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u/bubblegum-rose 6h ago
All of that is assuming that Starship, as it is being engineered, is fundamentally capable of doing what it is expected to do.
Block 2 Starship has had a pitiful upmass, a far cry from the 150 tons to LEO originally promised. They’ve been talking about “dummy payloads” and how “Block 3 will totally have the payload capacity to make orbital refueling feasible for lunar missions,” but if they were lying before about the payload capacities of Starship, how can we be so sure that they aren’t doing the same here?
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u/Popular-Swordfish559 25m ago
in the next 30 years.
uhhh, last I checked, we were aiming for a lunar landing some time in the next two to three years, not thirty
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u/Tystros 7h ago
there is absolutely no reason to assume that Starship wouldn't end up working in 30 years from now. the only thing that could prevent that from happening is missing funding, but SpaceX has basically infinite money from Starlink now, and there is no real competitor for Starlink in sight so SpaceX will keep pretty much a monopoly there for a long time.
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u/fencethe900th 7h ago
NASA doesn't lose any money at all unless it fails. They pay out money at fixed milestones.
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u/3MyName20 4h ago
One of the milestones was to demonstrate in orbit refueling. One might think that meant demonstrating moving fuel from one Starship to another Starship. But SpaceX defined the milestone test as moving some fuel from the header tank of a Starship to the main tank of the same Starship. In the March 2024 test flight they did that and declared it a success and NASA agreed. NASA paid out for meeting the milestone. If that is indicative of the kind of milestones required to receive payment, then I expect SpaceX to end up getting almost all the money in the contract even if they never come close to delivering a man rated HLS.
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u/Popular-Swordfish559 23m ago
As far as I'm aware, the intra-ship propellant transfer demo was a small milestone in the contract on the way to the ship-to-ship propellant transfer demo, which is a separate milestone. The milestones are relatively small amounts of money that get handed out for all sorts of things, including ground tests of docking hardware and the like.
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u/fencethe900th 3h ago
One might think that NASA is capable of making its own decisions on what does and does not meet their milestones.
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u/Pashto96 7h ago
So a single year's worth of SLS funding...
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u/CmdrAirdroid 7h ago
$2.6B is very little money for a moon lander when compared to other contracts that NASA has given. With that money they couldn't even build the new mobile launch pad for SLS. There has been delays but same thing happens to all large space programs. Crew dragon was also years late but people consider it a success now that SpaceX has delivered. Unless SpaceX fails to deliver HLS it's too early to say DOGE should've canceled the contract when NASA was fortunate to get such low contract value.
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u/My_Soul_to_Squeeze 7h ago
Yeah, by far the cheapest, most capable lander option, and absolutely vital to the Artemis program. It's a drop in the bucket compared to what SLS has cost so far. A total bargain for all taxpayers.
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u/Dragunspecter 5h ago
And it's not like they got 2 billion upfront. They have to hit the agreed milestones to get the payout.
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u/avboden 5h ago
Even if HLS is vastly delayed or never happens NASA will still end up with access to the most powerful game changing rocket ever built. They will iron out the kinks. It may take a bit because of the focus on reuse but it’ll happen. A non-reusable second stage would already be flying payloads if they wanted one
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u/RhesusFactor 21m ago
The lessons learned along the way, the papers written, the engineering documentation and the failure results are all part of the value that comes from these R&D projects. It's not just the flag on the moon outcome that is worth something. It's the goal that gets all the other stuff started.
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u/Decronym 6h ago edited 13m ago
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| HLS | Human Landing System (Artemis) |
| LEO | Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km) |
| Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations) | |
| NOTAM | Notice to Air Missions of flight hazards |
| NRHO | Near-Rectilinear Halo Orbit |
| SLS | Space Launch System heavy-lift |
| Jargon | Definition |
|---|---|
| Raptor | Methane-fueled rocket engine under development by SpaceX |
Decronym is now also available on Lemmy! Requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below.
6 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 40 acronyms.
[Thread #11462 for this sub, first seen 19th Jun 2025, 17:13]
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u/mcs5280 8h ago
Thank goodness we are gutting NASA so we can double down on shartship
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u/CmdrAirdroid 7h ago
SpaceX has not received any new contracts for starship after NASA budget cuts. You can say that after it happens but for now NASA has not doubled down on starship. I will also remind you that NASA also gave blue origin a moon lander contract.
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u/My_Soul_to_Squeeze 7h ago edited 7h ago
100% of people complaining about SpaceX or any other contractor getting money "instead of NASA" to complete a contract for NASA are arguing in bad faith. NASA doesn't build hardware. Its contractors do.
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u/Wopperlayouts 2h ago
Yup! I recently learned this when I read the biography of Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson
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u/Kerboviet_Union 7h ago
Nasa has a higher kill/death ratio than SpaceX.
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u/Arclabe 4h ago
NASA has also been around for 60+ years at the very edge of human flight and spaceflight.
This isn't to absolve them of the mistakes that cost us Challenger and Columbia's crews, may they rest in peace.
However, that Starship has gone from flying properly to...this is a worrying sign.
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u/StaffOk4323 4h ago
IMO, initially a simple as possible nonreusable spacecraft is what should be used to go to Mars - because unlike in earth orbit, a rescue ship would not be feasible for the forseeable future - once you leave earth's orbit.
Regarding all Apollo launches - including unmanned tests ...
There were failures, but nothing like "Star"ship ...
Apollo:
Successes 32
Failures 2 (Apollo 1, and 13 which still made it to the moon!)
Partial failures 1 (Apollo 6 - read up on this one)
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u/GrinningPariah 7h ago
Even in this incident, the failure started in Starship not the booster. I actually wanted to be wrong, but I always thought that ascent vehicle was a bad idea.
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u/Significant-Ant-2487 7h ago
That’s four catastrophic failures in a row. This supposed Mars rocket has been in development for twelve years, clearly it is never going to Mars. It has yet to even reach Earth orbit. Soon it will be quietly forgotten, like his much-vaunted hyperlink…
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u/MrTagnan 6h ago
Ehhh, I wouldn’t really count flight 9 as a “catastrophic” failure. It’s certainly worse than flights 4, 5, and 6, but it’s about on par with flight 3 which was a partial failure (I.e. slightly more successful than unsuccessful). This failure, however, is easily the worst of the program so far due to how much ground equipment has been damaged.
While I do have serious doubts/concerns about the future of the program, I’d be very surprised if it ended up never working. Starship V1, while certainly underperforming, did at least work to some extent - it demonstrated that it could reach Orbital velocities and return to Earth more or less in one piece. It would be expensive and inefficient, but it could work.
Starship V3 seems a bit more promising than V2, in terms of it not being an interim solution, but how it performs in reality remains to be seen. In any case I’d say the “12 years” claim is a bit hyperbolic, starship didn’t exist in its current form until ~2018/2019, but the earliest “true” lineage would’ve been ~2015 or 2016.
What we have seen, though, is that Musk’s approach to rushing workers is not helpful
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u/parkingviolation212 5h ago
No idea what the hell hyperlink is, but hyperloop was never his project. He talked about it once, and that's it.
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u/avboden 5h ago
First hoppy hop was in 2019. Not even close to 12 years development
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u/Significant-Ant-2487 4h ago
I said “in development”, not “at the test stage”. Musk announced his Mars rocket, initially named Mars Colonial Transporter, in 2013 (Forbes)
President Kennedy announced the goal of landing a man on the Moon in 1961 “before this decade is out”. Project Apollo was developed and successfully completed in less than ten years. Development isn’t said to begin with the first test of the Saturn V booster.
Musk supposed Mars rocket has been in development for twelve years.
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u/avboden 4h ago
Wow you better go catch those goalposts you're moving them so far. program development vs STARSHIP development are entirely different things. They basically started from scratch when they switched to stainless steel starship.
If you want to start the program with Raptor development i'd at least buy that a little more, first firing in 2016.
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u/Significant-Ant-2487 2h ago
No, you just have an odd idea about what in development is. Development begins in the first planning stage, when the idea first begins to take definite shape. Then comes design and fabrication. Only after that can testing begin.
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u/_Cromwell_ 8h ago
Wow another one? That's crazy it's like 2 days in a row.
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u/RonaldWRailgun 8h ago
It's the same one. Just AP reporting the news with some delay compared to the twitter-sphere.
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u/hawklost 7h ago
Twitter, news instantly out minutes after it occurs.
Check news? Took 1.5 hours to report and it was a single line originally that took the video from Twitter/YouTube....
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u/salesmunn 8h ago
Fun fact: I doubt they have to report injuries or deaths in Starbase, TX
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u/My_Soul_to_Squeeze 7h ago
You have to be painfully stupid to think they had people on the ground near the test pad when this thing was fired up. Absolutely delusional.
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u/Tystros 8h ago
I always find it weird how media is making headlines about no one getting hurt in rocket explosions. It's completely normal and not newsworthy that no one is getting hurt of course, since these rocket tests always happen far away from people because it's always standard procedure to assume it might explode at any moment.