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.

  • Phoenicianpirate@lemm.ee
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    5 days ago

    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.

    • Regrettable_incident@lemmy.world
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      5 days ago

      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.

  • courval@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    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.

    • AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

      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)

  • Bieren@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    Everything was fine when Biden was in office. What is Trump doing to allow this to happen?

  • lefty7283@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    ship loses attitude control and burns up on reentry

    Welcome back, starship flight 3

  • LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.world
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    5 days 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.