The bad news: another SpaceX Starship exploded spectactularly.
The good news: it blew up on the ground, so it’s not raining fiery debris down on the Caribbean.
Other good news: that’s Elon Musk’s reputation going kabooooom.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
See, progress after all!
Luckily, no one seems to have been anywhere near this thing when it blew up, would have been much less funny.
Also goodnit was only the upper stage, no idea what the blast radius would have been with the first stage’s fuel!
This Major Anomaly should be cashiered! I’m assuming he’s a Trump appointee.
Repeat posting from the Infinite Thread:
Honda Launches A Reusable Rocket And It Didn’t Even Explode
American tax dollars pay for this, but not for the Trans suicide hotline.
Meanwhile, in Austin, Texas, Tesla has stopped manufacturing Tesla Cybertrucks. Muskrat bragged Tesla could manufacture 25,000 – 500,00 Cybertrucks per year. They have produced 46,000 to date.
That’s the first bit of good news I’ve seen in days.
No doubt lots of engineers and technicians are getting yelled at by the guy who demanded a rush job.
I actually saw a cybertruck in Morris. It looked ridiculous.
@PZ, #8
There’s several in my town. I laugh every time I see one. People who thought the Pontiac Aztec was ugly didn’t know what was coming…
At this point the Musk-stans are shouting “They’ll learn from their failures.” Yeah, at this rate, the nerds at Space X must be damn near omniscient right now.
I’ve seen plenty of Wank-panzers prowling the streets in the Waukesha/Suburban-Milwaukee area. One of them–I shit you not–has a wrap to make it look like the General Lee from the Dukes of Hazard. Ugh.
We live in a capitalist society.
At issue isn’t ‘how many failures will it take for them to learn’ but ‘how many failures will it take for our government (which is subsidizing this folderol) to learn’. If they continue to get paid, then there is no motivation to do better. Give us money -> we give you lovely explosions. Isn’t that neat-o?
@11 seachange is right.
We say: The muskrat is a nasty kid playing irresponsibly with huge fireworks. The american taxpayer has poured billions into his make-it-up-as-you-go disasters and he has showered huge areas of this planet with toxic waste and never taken responsibility. PULL THE PLUG, ALREADY.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX had an even more spectacular failure than his last spectacular failure last night. Whoa!! Not only did his latest Starship blow up, but fuel tanks nearby caught fire as well.
Pierce R. Butler@7:
Well, hopefully a few more of the engineers will take a hike then. The competent people seem to have mostly left SpaceX by now, if Mux drives out the rest, things might end without anyone getting killed by this oversized fireworks.
Akira MacKenzie@10:
Yeah, I found someone comparing the latest disaster with Goddard’s experiments to design the first liquid fuelled rocket ever. “New technology never works the first time!” Hilarious.
In my area, some of the Tesla cars have bumper stickers that read:
“I bought this car before we knew Elon Musk was crazy.”
This is common everywhere now.
A few days ago, I saw a Tesla car with the back car medallion (or emblem or badge) removed, which for Tesla is a stylized metallic T.
This is to disguise it.
This is also common.
More ambitious people put on the car trademark of another car company.
This works because Tesla styling is generic, nothing really stands out.
A significant number of the world’s population will never buy anything associated with…Elon Musk.
The regular Teslas are fairly plain, kinda like an electrified Ford Taurus. I don’t like seeing them because the Musk connection.
Cybertrucks are a hideous abomination. The wraps don’t help.
Environmental disaster.
yet the stock price is still …where? why is the valuation anything more than 1/10 of Volkswagen? without government subsidies, spacex isn’t profitable (neither is Tesla automotive division) I suspect the same is true for tesla solar and starlink… and X has never made a dollar in profit. It’s all grift and suckling on uncle sam’s teat
Beautiful video. Now they’re exploding before they blast off.
A number of Musk Trucks where I live. One is wrapped with a Solar Panel Company logo and sports an expired temporary plate. Are the local cops not allowed to stop Musk vehicles?
I saw a Tesla recently with a bumper sticker on one side that read “Anti-Elon Tesla Club”, on the other side of the car was a Harris/Walz 24 sticker. I shared this with a friend who owns a Tesla because I know he hates Musk.
@2 Muskrat’s days as a special federal employee have ended. Also apparently his time as First Lady. Felon and Lump still haven’t kissed and made up and it’s increasingly clear that they won’t. File that under “win”.
@9, 10 Oh god, the Fuglymobile. No other automobile abomination even comes close. Not even the stretch Hummer. There are a number of them on the roads where I live. I laugh whenever I see one getting rained on, because they rust out at the drop of a hat and the wraps don’t prevent the rust either. There’s a Tesla dealer about a half hour away from where I live and every time I see it, there are more vehicles in the lot, not less.
Thanks for the laugh Akira. Now I can’t get that visual of the General Lee cyberabomination out of my mind. What aneurism made the owner think that was a good idea.
@14, 19 The bumper stickers for Teslas around here are “pre-madness edition” and “I can’t afford to sell it”.
Scott Manley’s analysis of this latest spectacular Starship failure here via Infinite thread :
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2025/04/03/infinite-thread-xxxv/comment-page-9/#comment-2269354
Ofc, their Falcon 9 rocket and frex barge landings had plenty of failures too and still eventually got there. See How Not to Land an Orbital Rocket Booster – just over 2 mins.
Starship will too.
Yeah, some people say it can’t work. They said that before about plenty of things esp flying machines and were proven wrong. They said the LEM (Apollo Lunar Module) was an absolute lemon that wouldn’t work once too. In fact,
Source : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gus_Grissom#Apollo_program
It landed people on our planet’s Moon.
One day – like with the barge landings clip linked and the anecdote here about the Apollo program – people will look back in hindsight and laugh and say, yeah, there were some early issues but that the critics were ultimately proven totally wrong.
Usual reminder / disclaimer : Talking here about SpaceX the private space agency and NOT about Musk who is an appalling excuse for a human. Really shouldn’t need to keep reminding folks that these are two separate things but apparently the all-consuming justified hatred of the South African scumbag does seem to be constantly blinding people when it comes to the only American or Western group taking astronauts to the International Space Station and just how impressive Space X actually is. NASA trusts and relies on Space X – admittedly too much probly & wish they had some alternatives as well but still – & that should count for something given their record and expertise.
“Ofc, their Falcon 9 rocket and frex barge landings had plenty of failures too and still eventually got there.”
I wouldn’t be so quick to compare the two, given circumstances.
Anyway, I asked Bubblebot:
Starship Explosions (Chronological)
1. Late 2019 — “StarPopper” tank implosion
2. Feb 28, 2020 — SN1 cryogenic test failure
3. Apr 3, 2020 — SN3 collapse during pressure test
4. May 29, 2020 — SN4 static fire explosion
5. Nov 2020 — SN7 tank rupture
6. Dec 9, 2020 — SN8 crash on landing
7. Feb 2, 2021 — SN9 landing-burn failure
8. Mar 3, 2021 — SN10 exploded post-landing
9. Mar 30, 2021 — SN11 exploded mid-air
10. Jan 16, 2025 — Ship 34 exploded minutes after launch
11. Mar 6, 2025 — Ship 35 broke up during reentry
12. May 27, 2025 — Ship 35 mid-flight disintegration
13. Jun 18, 2025 — Ship 36 exploded on test stand
Falcon 9 Explosions (Chronological)
1. Jun 28, 2015 — CRS-7 breakup mid-flight due to strut failure
2. Sep 1, 2016 — AMOS-6 explosion during static fire
3. Feb 15, 2023 — Starlink 9–3 second-stage engine anomaly (partial failure)
Starship’s development embraced failure as iteration. Falcon 9 prioritized reliability from the outset. Two rockets, two philosophies.
Falcon 9
– Start of development: November 2005
– First successful launch: June 4, 2010
– Duration: ~4.5 years from concept to orbital flight
Starship
– Start of development: Early 2019 (with Starhopper tests)
– Still in development as of June 2025
– Duration: ~6.5 years and counting
So Falcon 9 went from blueprint to orbit in under five years. Starship, aiming for full reusability and interplanetary capability, has already surpassed that timeline and remains in its iterative test phase.
As of June 18, 2025, the Falcon 9 family has launched 503 times, achieving:
500 full mission successes
2 in-flight failures (CRS-7 in 2015, Starlink Group 9–3 in 2024)
1 pre-launch failure (AMOS-6 in 2016)
1 partial failure (CRS-1 in 2012: primary mission succeeded, secondary payload stranded)
You can find the full breakdown on Wikipedia’s Falcon 9 launch list.
I see Teslas, both cars and Cybertrucks, in the wild all of the time but have yet to see anyone try to disguise it, justify it with an explanatory bumper sticker, or vandalize one.
I guess we’re more chill here in Maryland.
@22.John Morales : Okay,interesting. However my example was actually that video showing the landing attempts linked in my #21 above. Did you watch that one?
No, I didn’t watch that one.
I haven’t watched any, other than in passing.
(Explosions are not my thing)
That noted, you might enjoy NASA’s reporting on the featured RUD:
https://www.youtube.com/live/WKwWclAKYa0
Big boom, but. Methalox engines.
cf. https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=50049.0
Propellant mass
CH4 main tank: 263.8t
LOX main tank: 981.3t
Mass ratio: 1:3.71
LOX header tank: 22964.1kg
CH4 header tank: 7310.71kg
—
Also, CH₄(g) + 2O₂(g) → CO₂(g) + 2H₂O(g) + 891 kJ — so not much pollution, but a fair bit of exothermy.
@21 (StevoR):
Scott Manley knows a great deal more about rocket engineering than I do, but I find his optimism somewhat misplaced. He notes that, during the transition from Starship v1 to Starship v2, (paraphrasing) “Anyone can build a bridge, but it takes an engineer to barely build a bridge.” There’s a lot of truth to that, but if we’re looking at Starship, they haven’t even built the bridge yet.
Also, you mention that “they” said that the LEM was an absolute lemon, but the anecdote you quote to bolster that claim isn’t even about the LEM. The lemon was hung on a simulator of the Apollo Block 1 CSM, and noting that name is important. Why Block 1? Because, as it turns out, that CSM was a lemon — and after the Apollo 1 fire, they redesigned it from scratch with different engineering priorities, giving rise to the Block 2. It’s worth noting that there is no redesigning from scratch for Starship, so expecting its success on the basis that the Block 2 Apollo CSM took us to the Moon requires ignoring very important reasons the Block 2 was successful.
(While the LEM had significant challenges and delays, it was generally highly regarded by everyone that flew one. It’s now generally considered the most reliable component of the Apollo-Saturn stack, and is unquestionably the reason that the crew of Apollo 13 returned to Earth alive.)
When considering lemons, don’t compare apples and oranges.
So what? They said it about the philosopher’s stone, perpetual motion machines, cold fusion, the Titan submersible… and were proven right. You need to look at the actual arguments, and the record thus far.
Bo and Luke Duke would never drive a wussy thing like a Cybertruck. In fact a 21st Century version of them would probably have a General Lee capable of rolling coal, especially for the episode were Boss Hogg is running a scam revolving around renewable energy. Because there probably would be one.
It’s surprising that someone hasn’t tried to get Netflix or whoever to back a new version of The Dukes of Hazzard. Kevin Sorbo say, with himself as Uncle Jesse.
As for Musk the title of this post makes me wonder if he’s a Boom Again Christian.
StevoR @21:
Yeah, you keep saying that. As if Musk isn’t the CTO. As if Musk has no say in the direction, protocol and priorities in development. You’ve got rose-tinted glasses and blinkers on.
But they’re not. Anyone still working at SpaceX is at the least saying they are prepared to work for that “appalling excuse for a human”. And it may be that he’s already driven away a lot of the talented engineers – not only by his general vileness, but by demanding things they know are not possible.
Incidentally, I recently watched a UK Channel 4 documentary “NASA, Nazis and the Space Race” – highly recommended if you can get to see it. Jesus wept. Werner von Braun would easily have outclassed Musk for sheer evil until the latter took up starving babies for fun and profit by shutting down USAID. And von Braun was by no means alone – the USA recruited and whitewashed 1,600 Nazi military scientists for their expertise in rocketry, chemical and biological weapons, and other areas – and many moved over to NASA when the “Space Race” became a front in the Cold War.
“When I first came here, this was all swamp. Everyone said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built in all the same, just to show them. It sank into the swamp. So I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one stayed up. And that’s what you’re going to get, Lad, the strongest castle in all of England.”
@31. KG :
Yes. As a person Von Braun is massively problematic and has a really bad history and yet the Apollo program was arguably the most impressive thing our species has ever done and one of the greatest rockets and feats of engineering in history.
Plus Von Braun isn’t NASA or even the Apollo program despite him being a part – even having played a major part in that.
Likewise, Elon Musk isn’t SpaceX or even the Starship program despite him being a part – even having played a major part in that.
Which also answers #30 Rob Grigjanis.
@28. KG : The Titan sub actually worked for a little while. But anyhow. Plenty of counter-examples already cited too. The mere fact that someone says something can’t work doesn’t mean they’re right.
Of course, I have my biases -and other people have their biases too.