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.
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.