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 has missed every single HLS milestone and is the primary reason the Artemis program is delayed:
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The contract awarded to SpaceX and Starlink under the Trump FCC was rescinded after Biden’s FCC decided that they weren’t meeting the requirements of the contract.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.”
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.
This is an argument for giving them less money not spacex more. A huge swarm of LEO comsats that must be constantly replaced is a poor idea compared to fiber + 5G towers for most environments. The latter is much much cheaper.
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)