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.
I remember a NASA engineer saying that if NASA had half the failures that SpaceX has had in its early days they would have been disbanded as an organization and their funding pulled completely.
Yet this private org somehow gets bailed out again and again and again and again and again all while not only wasting massive tax payer money, but also causing a hell of a lot of waste. SpaceX is the waste fraud and abuse that should be trashed, not the national park service.
thats why he moved to texas, less regulations there.
Less workplace rights and employee protections
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SpaceX is still hitting the milestones on their NASA contracts
SpaceX has missed every single HLS milestone and is the primary reason the Artemis program is delayed:
By definition, this is not a bailout or waste of taxpayer money, as it was fairly competed on the open market, and approved by the congresspeople who were voted in by the public.
SpaceX famously hired William Gerstenmaier and Kathy Luedens right after they awarded them billions for the falcon and crew capsule. They barely skated by the government’s “revolving door” conflict of interest regulations because SpaceX put them on “unrelated” projects.
The contract awarded to SpaceX and Starlink under the Trump FCC was rescinded after Biden’s FCC decided that they weren’t meeting the requirements of the contract.
Now SpaceX is awash in newly minted federal contracts from Trump’s new federal agencies and Musk’s “special employee” status.
SpaceX’s funding has never been “approved by congress” outside of some confirmed cabinet positions, nor has it ever been what one could call completely “fair.”
The contract awarded to SpaceX and Starlink under the Trump FCC was rescinded after Biden’s FCC decided that they weren’t meeting the requirements of the contract.
This was the most ridiculous thing ever.
The money was to provide ABC service by XYZ time. Nowhere in the contract did it say you had to provide that service ahead of that deadline, and when they weren’t meeting that service on some random test years ahead of that deadline, they said, you’re not gonna make it and rescinded it.
No one else had that requirement put on them, and that money was to help accelerate the delivering of said service.
Edit: Had SpaceX been awarded the money, their first deadline would have been sometime in 2025/2026 and they’d have to be serving 40% of the population they said they would.
It was rescinded because there was no reason to believe at point of rescission that it was possible to meet the benchmarks. To simplify if you intend to drive 1000 miles in 5 days and on day 3 you are 200 miles in there is no reason to believe you can meet the deadline.
In your analogy, they were on day 0.
They had not been awarded any money, money that was meant to help accelerate the deployment. The 3 year deadline only starts AFTER they would have received the money to do it. The service doesn’t work without satellites launched, and the money was to launch said satellites.
No one else had this limitation put on them.
The government is legally allowed to make that judgement. Satellite internet is a tremendously dumb way to provide rural internet.
And yet the big telco’s have gotten billions of dollars to do it over the years, don’t do it or come nowhere near the requirements, and ask for even more money, meanwhile SpaceX has done it, and it’s profitable.
For the record: Why did you lie about them hitting their milestones on the NASA contract?
SpaceX’s cost to launch Starship just got substantially cheaper as well.
They just launched Starship into space for the cost of fuel/minor refurbishment/operational cost instead of the cost of a whole new booster this launch. They reused the booster and 29/33 raptor engines (1 of which has flown 3 times). The only reason it went kaboom was they were doing a very aggressive test increase performance to see if it would fail since their modelling showed it may or may not work. It did not.
SpaceX has designed, launched, landed, and reused an orbital rocket TWICE before anyone has done it once, and yet people just see failure. (And NASA’s doesn’t really count as it cost just as much to refurbish it as making a new one)
Next time put that Nazi fuck Elon in it.
It seems like destiny for that to be how dies. Killed by his own hubris like Mr. Expired carbon fiber submarine.
i wonder if he would even go into one of his rockets anymore.
Elon could eat the exhaust
I thought it said SpaceX lost a contract and got excited for a moment
Yeah. I don’t like having this response because I feel like anything that increases our reach and activity in space is a positive step. It’s unfortunate that spacex has musk’s shitty fingerprints all over it.
Best part of this is that they just won the contract for launch services even though they still haven’t proven the thing can fly without blowing up yet.
Well, they still have the smaller rockets that usually don’t blow up.
No cardboard, no cellotape, highest quality materials
Launch services isn’t a contract to launch anything, it’s just NASA collecting information about every rocket. Rockets that blow up just get listed as Category I High Risk, allowed for Class D payloads that are cheap and replaceable.
Musk reaction video:
ship loses attitude control and burns up on reentry
Welcome back, starship flight 3
“Uh, yeah, it was supposed to do that. We learn a lot from billion dollar failures.”
People estimate ~100 million, which is still a lot. Of course it’s worth noting that they weren’t attempting to launch a payload or really recover much of anything, so the only real cost of failure is that they might need to launch more test flights later than they otherwise would have had to.
Apparently estimated total development costs are probably a bit less than half of the Artemis program cost, although the Artemis program has actually developed a fully functional and reliable rocket by now. So it’s hard to say if SpaceX’s development method will be cheaper in the long run. (Discounting the later manufacturing costs because I don’t see any reason why a more ULA, Blue Origin, or NASA-like development process wouldn’t still be capable of producing a cheap rocket if that was the focus)
Honestly losing to the US military industrial complex in development cost would be pretty embarrassing. (Congress makes NASA use all the MIC suppliers for their rockets)
I’m sure SpaceX workers are all super inspired and motivated to make a shit ass cunt neo nazi billionaire achieve his megalomaniac space goals… I heard they’re even putting the extra hour for free.
Damn, I thought it said “loses contract.”
Governments are still going to throw money at anything this guy does. Useful idiots couldn’t have been more useful a few years ago.
I guess you have to call a place on solid ground Starbase when everything you build to carry building supplies into space to build a Starbase fails.
Go fetch it and re-use it.
Elons not a nazi, because nazis are good at making rockets
They are actually more alike than you suggest:
All the money being spent on this bullshit could’ve been better spent improving the living conditions of the working class.
Lmaooo in the USA? Unlikely.
Well, there are at least 5 million Starlink users around the world, and I’m sure if you ask them they’ll say their lives and living conditions have been improved.
Just like Elon musk’s mind has lost contact with reality… Because of ketamine…
Everything was fine when Biden was in office. What is Trump doing to allow this to happen?
