Back-to-back mishaps indicate big setbacks for program to launch satellites and send humans to the moon and Mars

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.

  • @halcyoncmdrEnglish
    6•2 days ago

    They are learning, but the versions launched are never the current version at launch time, they are all older models. As changes are made those changes go into the next one being built, not the ones currently under construction already, unless it’s an easy retrofit, like when they were changing the tile layouts.

    And even those retrofitted changes may not be adequate depending on the cause. When dealing with lost vehicles you also have limited forensic evidence to use to determine root causes. Cameras don’t see everything sensors don’t log every aspect. And fixes you thought were adequate, may not actually be enough. That’s why they iterate and try again in the real world, instead of just simulating everything and hoping it works at launch for 10x the cost. These issues sometimes taking multiple tries to fix are an expected parts of the process.