SpaceX mission control lost contact with the rocket after it leaked fuel and spun out of control, despite already flying halfway around the world
SpaceX mission control lost contact with its latest Starship rocket on Tuesday, as it leaked fuel, spun out of control, and made an uncontrolled re-entry after flying halfway around the world, likely disintegrating over the Indian Ocean, officials said.
“Just to confirm, we did lose contact with the ship officially a couple of minutes ago. So that brings an end to the ninth flight test,” said SpaceX’s Dan Huot during a live feed.
Starship, the futuristic rocket on which Elon Musk’s ambitions for multiplanetary travel are riding, roared into space from Texas on its ninth uncrewed test launch and flew further than the last two attempts that ended in explosive failure.
Everything was fine when Biden was in office. What is Trump doing to allow this to happen?
Just like Elon musk’s mind has lost contact with reality… Because of ketamine…
I’m sure SpaceX workers are all super inspired and motivated to make a shit ass cunt neo nazi billionaire achieve his megalomaniac space goals… I heard they’re even putting the extra hour for free.
“Uh, yeah, it was supposed to do that. We learn a lot from billion dollar failures.”
People estimate ~100 million, which is still a lot. Of course it’s worth noting that they weren’t attempting to launch a payload or really recover much of anything, so the only real cost of failure is that they might need to launch more test flights later than they otherwise would have had to.
Apparently estimated total development costs are probably a bit less than half of the Artemis program cost, although the Artemis program has actually developed a fully functional and reliable rocket by now. So it’s hard to say if SpaceX’s development method will be cheaper in the long run. (Discounting the later manufacturing costs because I don’t see any reason why a more ULA, Blue Origin, or NASA-like development process wouldn’t still be capable of producing a cheap rocket if that was the focus)
Honestly losing to the US military industrial complex in development cost would be pretty embarrassing. (Congress makes NASA use all the MIC suppliers for their rockets)
Best part of this is that they just won the contract for launch services even though they still haven’t proven the thing can fly without blowing up yet.
Launch services isn’t a contract to launch anything, it’s just NASA collecting information about every rocket. Rockets that blow up just get listed as Category I High Risk, allowed for Class D payloads that are cheap and replaceable.
Well, they still have the smaller rockets that usually don’t blow up.
No cardboard, no cellotape, highest quality materials
I thought it said SpaceX lost a contract and got excited for a moment
Yeah. I don’t like having this response because I feel like anything that increases our reach and activity in space is a positive step. It’s unfortunate that spacex has musk’s shitty fingerprints all over it.
aw man, same
I remember a NASA engineer saying that if NASA had half the failures that SpaceX has had in its early days they would have been disbanded as an organization and their funding pulled completely.
Yet this private org somehow gets bailed out again and again and again and again and again all while not only wasting massive tax payer money, but also causing a hell of a lot of waste. SpaceX is the waste fraud and abuse that should be trashed, not the national park service.
thats why he moved to texas, less regulations there.
Less workplace rights and employee protections
NASA’s cost of failure in the past was significantly higher, and their development lifecycle was designed to support this. SpaceX’s cost of failure is orders of magnitude less, and their development model is designed to support that. They can throw all the money at the development of the system they want. If they were too in the hole between private investment, Starlink proceeds, and yes, government contracts, they would go bankrupt.
SpaceX is still hitting the milestones on their NASA contracts, which were awarded well before the work started. How much it costs to reach those milestones is not a factor the government cares about. By definition, this is not a bailout or waste of taxpayer money, as it was fairly competed on the open market, and approved by the congresspeople who were voted in by the public.On the other hand, if you think the entire Artemis endeavor was a waste of taxpayer money, that would be a more fair argument, but that has little to do with any SpaceX hardware failures.
Edit: corrected some misconceptions on initially proposed milestones. Engineering lifecycle points still stand.
SpaceX is still hitting the milestones on their NASA contracts
SpaceX has missed every single HLS milestone and is the primary reason the Artemis program is delayed:
By definition, this is not a bailout or waste of taxpayer money, as it was fairly competed on the open market, and approved by the congresspeople who were voted in by the public.
SpaceX famously hired William Gerstenmaier and Kathy Luedens right after they awarded them billions for the falcon and crew capsule. They barely skated by the government’s “revolving door” conflict of interest regulations because SpaceX put them on “unrelated” projects.
The contract awarded to SpaceX and Starlink under the Trump FCC was rescinded after Biden’s FCC decided that they weren’t meeting the requirements of the contract.
Now SpaceX is awash in newly minted federal contracts from Trump’s new federal agencies and Musk’s “special employee” status.
SpaceX’s funding has never been “approved by congress” outside of some confirmed cabinet positions, nor has it ever been what one could call completely “fair.”
The contract awarded to SpaceX and Starlink under the Trump FCC was rescinded after Biden’s FCC decided that they weren’t meeting the requirements of the contract.
This was the most ridiculous thing ever.
The money was to provide ABC service by XYZ time. Nowhere in the contract did it say you had to provide that service ahead of that deadline, and when they weren’t meeting that service on some random test years ahead of that deadline, they said, you’re not gonna make it and rescinded it.
No one else had that requirement put on them, and that money was to help accelerate the delivering of said service.
Edit: Had SpaceX been awarded the money, their first deadline would have been sometime in 2025/2026 and they’d have to be serving 40% of the population they said they would.
It was rescinded because there was no reason to believe at point of rescission that it was possible to meet the benchmarks. To simplify if you intend to drive 1000 miles in 5 days and on day 3 you are 200 miles in there is no reason to believe you can meet the deadline.
In your analogy, they were on day 0.
They had not been awarded any money, money that was meant to help accelerate the deployment. The 3 year deadline only starts AFTER they would have received the money to do it. The service doesn’t work without satellites launched, and the money was to launch said satellites.
No one else had this limitation put on them.
The government is legally allowed to make that judgement. Satellite internet is a tremendously dumb way to provide rural internet.
And yet the big telco’s have gotten billions of dollars to do it over the years, don’t do it or come nowhere near the requirements, and ask for even more money, meanwhile SpaceX has done it, and it’s profitable.
For the record: Why did you lie about them hitting their milestones on the NASA contract?
SpaceX’s cost to launch Starship just got substantially cheaper as well.
They just launched Starship into space for the cost of fuel/minor refurbishment/operational cost instead of the cost of a whole new booster this launch. They reused the booster and 29/33 raptor engines (1 of which has flown 3 times). The only reason it went kaboom was they were doing a very aggressive test increase performance to see if it would fail since their modelling showed it may or may not work. It did not.
SpaceX has designed, launched, landed, and reused an orbital rocket TWICE before anyone has done it once, and yet people just see failure. (And NASA’s doesn’t really count as it cost just as much to refurbish it as making a new one)
Just for comparison, on their 9th test flight the Apollo program they had already successfully reached orbit 5 times.
The 9th test flight of the Soyuz was their 7th time reaching orbit.
Elon’s 9th attempt is his second time reaching the bottom of the Indian ocean. Shows the level of proficiency in spacex.
As a comparison too SpaceX can launch Starship at least 6 more times before reaching the cost of a single Saturn V launch, I an not even talking about development cost.
Starship also did reach orbital velocity on several launches.
The goals are different.
There hasn’t been a single one of elon’s companies that delivered on promised prices.
Falcon 9 is more expensive than promised. His tunnels weren’t cheaper. His cars are more expensive than promised. Cybertruck is over $100k when he promised under $40k at the launch.
Focus on what his companies can deliver. That is real. His fantasy rockets that would be superior in all ways do not exist.
It concerns me from a standpoint that is similar to Oceangate - the engineers are probably aware something is going wrong, but money is getting the final say. Then the people on one of these things end up dying, and it won’t be Musk.
I’m also concerned because this lax approach to engineering is becoming more apparent in the private sector. Engineers have a very difficult job -traditionally balancing budget, schedule, and quality. But we also are vital in ensuring regulatory compliance, safety, disposal, process, efficiency etc.
Engineer salaries, however, have stagnated like the rest of American workers. It’s true we still get paid better, but compared to how much the salary got you in the 80s-90s, we get much less.
Private sector engineers are largely not PEs as we’re shielded by our employers. We are more worried about being laid off than fucking up a project to the point lives get risked.
Part of this is why I chose to no longer work on systems that can cause injuries/ harm to a user. If I’m doing that, I can assume I’m not alone. If those of us consciously avoiding it because of fears of hurting users, it might mean that the ones working on the systems aren’t motivated by safety of the user.
The one good thing from oceangate was the fact that the CEO trusted his own life to his invention. He was in the sub when it imploded.
As stupid as he is, musk is unfortunately smart enough to know not to risk his own life in his own rockets.
he was use defective airplane parts as part of the hull, carbonfiber, instead of steel or titanium subs. he went supercheap, since his rides are 150k/per person. while the one james cameron was in was the titanium sub, which is 6-10mil per ride.
Oceangate, stockton basically cut corners on everything. hence he got killed by his owned hubris.
And while both of those programs weren’t starting from zero, like Apollo learned from Mercury and Gemini, SpaceX should have learned from all of them.
spacex is also not starting from zero. They previously made the falcon 9.
They don’t seem to be using what they learned from that, though.
The Saturn V’s 9th flight was the third time it took humans to the moon…
Apollo 9Apollo 8 went to the moon but they had multiple test flights prior to that numbering. Those are a more reasonable point of comparison.Edit: I misremembered the number.
Apollo 9 did not go to the moon. It was earth orbit rendezvous practice with the command module and the lunar lander module. Apollo 8 flew to and around the moon. Apollo 10 flew to the moon and lowered the lander (but not to the surface) and rendezvoused with the command module. Apollo 11 was the first to land on the moon.
I believe this is the 4th (or is it 5th?) time starship successfully reached orbit too (just lacking an insertion burn which is on purpose for these tests). But it’s also important to keep in context the fact that starship and super heavy are so big, while trying to be completely reusable and be assembly lined. Very different goals, technology, and ideas happening between the generations. One starship launch intends to replace between 3 and 5 falcon 9 launches if they can nail down the reliability.
They still haven’t tested it under the Artemis payload weights, either. They’re testing with 17 ton payload and last year at the starship launch celebration Musk said starship is supposed to be capable of 50 ton payloads to LEO. For comparison SLS block 2
can liftwill be able to lift 100 tons to LEO.The Artemis HLS is supposed to be 110 tons to the lunar surface, but supposedly loaded up in like 12 launches.
I assume they’re still a few years away from Starship being usable.
Artemis block 2 doesn’t exist yet, so it would be more accurate to say it “will be able to” lift 100 tons.
The space shuttle was also big and reusable. It did not have issues like these during development.
Starship block 2 design is significantly larger than shuttle was. Total cargo volume is already multiples of what shuttle could carry to space and is set to get larger in future designs as early as block 3. Shuttle also rode on a largely one-shot SLS rocket that was a lot smaller (by volume) than super heavy. It had reusable SRBs that were recovered but refurbishment was essentially the same cost as new. Meanwhile they have already caught booster multiple times and reused one, beating SLS in just tests.
It’s important to remember that both super heavy and starship are two separate projects and testbeds doing their own range of things while being literally the largest thing ever built and launched. The carrying capacity to orbit and beyond is completely unprecedented.
People laugh at the fact that it will take ~15-20 super heavy launches to refill one starship in orbit. But if they pull it off, it will be the only platform capable of bringing up to ~200 tonnes of capacity to the moon and beyond. That’s way more than Saturn V. And eclipses what shuttle ever did. Again, all while attempting to be completely reusable.
beating SLS in just tests
Technically the booster/starship combo has yet to lift the tonnage that SLS already lifted with Artemis I.
It’s obvious that it’ll be cheaper per ton than SLS but It’s still a little early to say what level of cost savings it has until we know how many tons super heavy and starship can actually lift. (The estimate SpaceX has been giving goes down by 50 tons every year)
starship’s payload to orbit is zero. No matter what is promised, a rocket that can only deliver payloads destructively to the bottom of the indian ocean is not a valuable launch vehicle. There are far more cost effective ways of making artificial reefs.
If you’ve followed elon musk’s projects you would know that the only thing he knows how to do is over-promise and under-deliver. It would be incredible if the things he’s promised happened, but none of them ever do. This starship will not be the exception.
That’s the thing though. NASA effectively deemed reuse an abject failure. They just sunk-cost their way through the SLS program until they couldn’t get the budget needed to keep to keep it up anymore. Also, do we even need to mention Challenger and Columbia? Or Apollo 1?
Elon is no more than a front-man for the band that is SpaceX who is doing the real engineering and hard work on this insanely huge project. All those engineers and workers who put everything they have into it are what is making this possible. The nazi can fuck off and SpaceX will still be able to achieve these incredible goals.
I’d also like to provide another gentle reminder that the way SpaceX are going about designing, iterating, and testing is completely different from the approach NASA and others have taken traditionally. Even Blue Origin are doing it the “safe” way more or less and are still having tons of problems. This is an extremely difficult thing to do at all. What people like to highlight as failures and “haha <thing> bad” are kinda the point. This past launch they built out a whole new flight profile for super heavy that pushed it beyond its calculated and simulated limits, to see how it behaves, which is why they didn’t attempt to catch this time.
~15-20 super heavy launches to refill one starship in orbit
While we don’t have exact figures, your 15-20 is probably a bit high. 15 is probably the high end of the estimates.
There’s that Smarter Every Day video that says something like 8-12 (joke is that with schedule slippage it’s more like 20)
By schedule slippage do you mean they can’t get them all up in time before it boils off too much and they need to do more?
Yea I think “8-12 launches” is the ideal with the launches being at a steady pace (not taking into account weather, launch problems requiring delays etc.)
I think that is less about competence and more about a completely different style of work. I don’t want to sound like a fanboy, but it isn’t apples and apples. There were much more stringent testing standards for that program. SpaceX is all about throwing shit in the dryer on the fluff cycle and seeing what they scrape off the lint screen.
Next time put that Nazi fuck Elon in it.
It seems like destiny for that to be how dies. Killed by his own hubris like Mr. Expired carbon fiber submarine.
i wonder if he would even go into one of his rockets anymore.
Elon could eat the exhaust
Musk reaction video:
Damn, I thought it said “loses contract.”
Governments are still going to throw money at anything this guy does. Useful idiots couldn’t have been more useful a few years ago.
ship loses attitude control and burns up on reentry
Welcome back, starship flight 3
I guess you have to call a place on solid ground Starbase when everything you build to carry building supplies into space to build a Starbase fails.
Elons not a nazi, because nazis are good at making rockets
They are actually more alike than you suggest:
Go fetch it and re-use it.
