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.
The coolest thing about Space X is that it knocked about 100 million dollars off the cost of putting a satellite in orbit. More, if you consider the possibility of multiple small satellites sharing a launch to a similar orbit.
This enabled many, many small research companies to begin developing satellites for Earth and atmospheric imaging which is advancing our ability to collect precise data about things like greenhouse gas emissions.
Fuck Musk, absolutely, but a lower barrier to entry to putting things in space absolutely has utility.