SpaceX's Starship Breaks Apart Shortly After Liftoff

SpaceX’s seventh launch of its starship mega rocket ended with an “unscheduled disassembly” on Thursday evening.


This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.avweb.com/aviation-news/spacex-starship-explodes-shortly-after-liftoff

In laymen’s terms, it blew up.

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That sure helped the environment!
Quick! Buy another BEV to help save the planet.
Doesn’t have to be a BEV, anything with a battery will do!

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My wife once experienced a sudden unexpected deceleration event resulting in rearrangement of auto parts…

It’s more likely that the Flight Termination System (FTS) was activated automatically due to loss of telemetry, as there was quite a gap between the progressive loss of engines (down to one when telemetry lost) and the “boom”.

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RUDs Happen. Quick! Someone go raid the cup on Elon’s nightstand so we can build another one.

" . . . it blew up"

But it shore blowed up good.

The planet doesn’t need saving, it knows what it’s doing.

Like Edison, Elon just discovered another way NOT to build a spaceship.

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JUMPIN’ JESUS CHRIST ON A CRUTCH!!! Reminds me of a saying from my years in public affairs. If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with BS.

We are not idiots. So much hysterical BS doublespeak on this one. An explosion is an “unscheduled disassembly,” “success comes from what we learn” and 'today’s flight will help us improve Starship’s reliability.” It better, for what our govt. contracts pay for it.

Then instead of waiting for the investigation, Musk speculates it was a fuel or ox leak. I’m no bilionaire or aerospace engineer, but I could have taken a wild stab at that.

FAA’s actions are equally as stupid. Delays of up to an hour due to the incident at two airports for “dangerous area for falling debris of rocket Starship?” How long does it take for junk to burn up and fall to the ground?

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It was at a very high altitude when it…dissasembled. Bits and pieces take a while taking from that altitude.

“Unscheduled disassembly” my ass! That was an unexpected failure ending in an explosion, not some genius plan. Unless, of course, the plan was to redefine failure as progress and call blowing up a rocket “thinking outside the launch pad.”

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Oh dang, guys. This thing didn’t blow up.

We got it all wrong! There was no “unscheduled disassembly” either. It was just a completely safe and well executed mission that fortunately mis-happened “outside of the environment”.

No. No cardboard. No cardboard derivatives. Nothing ordered from TEMU. Not even a product from DJI. At NO POINT was there any risk or damage to mother nature or the environment.

Maybe the front fell off? (Click the link for amusement purposes, I promise - it only goes to Youtube!)

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Very misleading headline. The booster performed nearly perfectly (one Raptor didn’t light during boost back burn but did during terminal burn), returned to launch site and was caught without problems. The ship got through maybe two thirds of planned burn before starting to lose engines. Disappointing, but several more ships are nearly complete at Boca Chica along with more boosters. The problems will be solved and they will fly again soon.

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I’m having trouble with the first sentence in your second paragraph.
Do you seriously think Elon didn’t consult with his engineers who looked at the telemetry and on board video before making his statement about the likely cause of the problem?

Here’s another link of examples of completely safe and well executed missions. The only difference, is the missions depicted in this link, were designed without the expectation of RUD.

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Where have you been? “Unscheduled rapid disassembly” is one of Elon’s early and more amusing toss offs in referring to his go fast and break things development philosophy.

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“With a test like this, success comes from what we learn…”

Success can also come from not making bad mistakes. We may never hear the truth but was there a leak prior to launch that was not detected? Were there appropriate sensors in that area (if they exist). This was the first version of the second generation Starship and did SpaceX adequately verify the changes for problem areas.

Starship simply executed an external fuel burn.