this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2025
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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.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago (2 children)

May all things of Musk crash and burn

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

To be fair, I’m gonna play devil’s advocate and point out that Falcon 9 is one of, if not the most reliable launch vehicles ever built, and their landing success rate is phenomenal, and that they got there by fucking up, a lot, and eventually figuring out how to not do that.

That being said, I’m getting pretty tired of Musk getting all of the credit for the work of countless engineers and scientists, where fuckboi’s physics doctorate doesn’t actually exist..

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

That's our money, every penny.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

Are those astronauts back on earth yet? No? Still stranded on the ISS? Okay...

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 week ago

How many american tax dollars were wasted on this DOGE???

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 week ago

Hmm maybe the FAA should not have cleared the flight since the rocket in January wasn't fully investigated to completion. You rush complex engineering and science and things go wrong.

[–] [email protected] 43 points 1 week ago

Right, they've perfected the rocket, now we just need to load Elon onto the next flight.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

We spent millions on the stainless dildo flying machine. The ruzzians used a pencil.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

.....Its the year 2026, January.... What feelings like a decade of misadministration has come to fruition. China has "developed" the most advanced paper-like electronic sheet material with a brain interface. We use a pencil now. Graphite! Who knew!

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

The world’s a pretty crazy place right now. If we put aside personalities and politics for a moment and focus on the engineering achievements, SpaceX is doing groundbreaking work. A few explosions here and there are part of the R&D process — they’re just big and obvious enough that they’re easy for us to spectate. Given the success of their Falcon 9 platform, that’s a cost they can easily eat and a risk enticing enough to take. NASA engineers a generation ago were similarly breaking ground on their frontier, be it orbiting the moon or preventing fires in space by avoiding free floating graphite particles 😉

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Meaningless if the end goal is murdering some people while helping others.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Can you explain further? How is SpaceX’s goal to murder people? That feels misplaced and I’d love understand what you mean!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Elon is selling access to the net to ruzzians invading Ukraine. How is that misplaced?

I'm embarrassed to have interviewed by that shit company back before their first rocket made it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I always forget about that. Do you think that reflects more on Elon or SpaceX employees?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I wouldn't work there if the goal was empowering that asshole with murderous tools.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

Yeah I hear you. There are truly very few options for work where you can be absolutely certain that no line can be drawn to enabling violence. Some are more obvious, blatant, and intentional than others.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Remember that Elon said we would land on Mars by 2024?

We haven't even started thinking about a Mars misson lmao

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 week ago (2 children)

That was always absurd, on the face of it. Heck, I don't even see the appeal of going to Mars.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Heck, I don't even see the appeal of going to Mars

There's no people there

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

Well, that's one thing it has going for it.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Obama era had everyone optimistic about the future.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago

We also desperately wanted any space program. The space shuttles were retired in 2011 and we were reliant on Russia for flights at that point.

Musk said the things progressives wanted to hear, but eventually we wanted substance. That's when he shifted to catering to conservatives, who are ok with being lied to.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 week ago (4 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 week ago (4 children)

I personally want Musk's space program to fail because scientific advances and achievements need to belong to the people, not some corporate asshole. Publically funded science is the only way to go. Also, NASA seemed to have mastered the rocket back in the 60s--SpaceX can't even do that.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

The Saturn V was built by Boeing, North American, and Douglas.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago

Unfortunately NASA rockets are also made by corporate assholes because everything is outsourced to the military industrial complex

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago

NASA's mission is to pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery, and aeronautics research. I’ll support any model that enables those principles. They paved the way in the 60s and that’s enabled others to succeed. Isn’t that the highest form of achievement? Look at what SpaceX has done with their massively reusable Falcon 9. The space shuttle flew 135 missions over 40 years; that’s about 3 a year. There’s been 453 Falcon 9 flights (134 in 2024 alone) and a single Falcon 9 stack has been reused 26 times… all of those achievements happened within a span of 15 years. I think it’s safe to say that they’ve mastered the rocket. You’re just seeing the R&D phase of their new one …which has the added spectacle of some rapid unscheduled disassemblies that we get to witness 😉

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

Not all space corporations are assholes as you say. I think rocket lab isn't to bad.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

Well I guess it's okay as long as he is not using the federal funding for Mars attempts, he can waste his shareholders money.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago

He titled himself as the chief engineer of SpaceX. And this is no joke.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 week ago

I think it can be attributed to Musk because he's the driving force behind pushing the "move fast and break things" mentality into rocket science. They haven't figured out why the last one blew up and they go ahead and launch another one which looks like it blew up for the same reasons.

That might work with non-critical software, but when you're talking about large rockets it's bound to get people killed eventually. At the very least they could've built a launch site for testing where the rockets aren't going over populated areas. But naw, build it in Texas and fire untested rockets over Caribbean countries, because there's not enough white people in those countries for Musk to give a shit.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Not a failure. The whole point of R&D before doing a genuine payload is to remove this sort of issue. While the association of the company with Musk is truly crappy, this explosion is genuinely useful.

If this project were European or under a different administration, I would feel the same.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

It is usefull but the trouble is that they should be much and much more certain about their designs. Let's say they want 99.99% reliability for real payload then they should by now be at 99.9% . If they want to do it by trail and error they would need to do a lot trials to show that they actually achieved that reliability. Otherwise the next one is still just as likely to explode. I guess what I'm trying to say is that you can't get there by trial and error.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

Unfortunately his fucking up has now been subsidized

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