Another SpaceX Starship prototype broke up over the Indian Ocean on Tuesday, capping the latest bumpy test flight for the rocket central to billionaire Elon Musk’s dream of colonising Mars.
The biggest and most powerful launch vehicle ever built lifted off at 6.36pm local time from the company’s facility near a southern Texas village that earlier this month voted to become a city also named Starbase.
The first signs of trouble emerged when the first-stage Super Heavy booster blew up instead of executing its planned splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico.
A live feed then showed the upper-stage spaceship failing to open its doors to deploy a payload of Starlink satellite “simulators”.
Apollo and Gemini? This is a clown show by NASA standards. Please tell the class how many times it took Mercury to not blow up.
The kicker is that NASA did it all for the first time. Musk has the benefit of all that experience, he’s just too full of himself to use it. I mean really, skipping the deluge system isn’t a “lesson learned”, it’s a fucking embarassment.
Promising the moon eventually, and nothing much now, isn’t how you run an engineering shop, it’s how you run a VC scam.