Starship’s V2 redesign suffered almost exactly the same failure on flight 8 as it did on flight 7, fire in the engine bay leading to engine failure and RUD.
There is alot more video of the inside and outside of the spacecraft. SpaceX has more video and sensors to analyze what happened.
Starship tumbled out of control before breaking up and landing in the Carribbean.
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I think DOGE had got elon distracted. He’s not focused enough on SpaceX, and it’s suffering without his leadership. The same thing has already happened to Tesla and the boring company.
Elon needs to swallow his pride and talk to some old hands from Marshall…but he has to drop the knife.
Time for the little boy to listen to Men.
Absolutely.
And it’s worth noting that the gross specs for the different version of Starship are different enough that data from old version may not even be totally applicable to the newer rockets (same problem with FSD on old Tesla models).
Also, Musk has promised the next change to Starship after the maximum height is reached will be to make it wider, more like the dimensions of Warner Von Bruan’s theoretical Mars rocket over 60 years ago (he should have probably gone with those dimensions to begin with; it would have been easier to land a “fat” rocket too). That future version of Starship will have to be tested all over again, and the FAA and other agencies can no longer be fully trusted since it’s been compromised by Musk (who even gave himself a communications deal for Starlink that Verizon had previously for years: https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/25/business/musk-faa-starlink-contract/index.html. There was no independent review, jus tMusk saying the old system wasn’t working). So, basically, none of these test mean very much, except that Starship and SpaceX have a lousy record with getting huge capacity rockets safely into orbit; there’s never been a Starship that’s completed a full orbit. NASA still has a better record with the Saturn V and that went all the way to the Moon several times with actual astronauts (Apollo 13 averted a nearly fatal astronauts with the help of mission control, so that aspect is also untested with SpaceX for beyond orbital flights).
Musk does tend to be a bit aggressive with his testing program. As opposed to BO, which was so unaggressive with their testing program that they didn’t even make orbit until late last year, despite starting before SpaceX.
I’ll admit there’s probably a happy medium somewhere in between, but I expect it’s a lot closer to Musk than Bezos.
“Starship and SpaceX have a lousy record with getting huge capacity rockets safely into orbit”
This completely misunderstands what is going on with Starship right now. Another rocket company building a rocket as big as Starship wouldn’t even have done a test launch yet! And yet, here they are, already nailing the booster catches. Who besides SpaceX would have even tried that?
It’s not a “try to get everything absolutely right on the first try” development program. It’s a “Build something, see how it breaks, and then fix that and repeat” development program. Lots of failures early on are expected!
If you gave another company 12billion and as much time as elon- they likely would have a fully functioning moon lander that was purpose built for the artemis mission.
The economics just don’t work for a rocket that big- but elon wouldn’t listen to that. Each flight to the moon requires 12-20 refueling launches of that same rocket so the question is why can’t we use a smaller rocket and launch it more often, requiring less refueling. And using liquid fuels for reusability is another challenge that maybe isn’t worth the effort. As anything reusable requires a high-cost in time and money, team that can go over every square inch of the craft and refurbish or replace components.
Unfortunately spacex holds all that data to itself so we’ll never know if much of the reusability is actually useful or if it’s just a ploy to get more private funding?
And the last starship test flight was to test deployment of satellites? That’s not what the contract was for! The Artemis contract requires spacex to conduct fuel transfer demonstration, landing demonstration etc… there is no inside tech being developed. That’s what all that money was for!
Funny you say that, didn’t NASA spend double that to launch the SLS once with an expected cost of $18 billion dollars per 4 launches including the replacement launch tower required every 4 launches (assuming nothing went wrong.
Space 8 lauching 8x for 12 billion seems cheap, even more so considering there have been revisions for each launch as well.
Should have done the test burn with the interstage in place, I’d say. See what that does to the engine compartment.
Just maybe, the move fast and break things paradigm doesn’t work for rockets? Blue Origin took years to get the ready of their first New Glenn flight and it was way more successful than all 8 Starship flights have been to date.
So when is the next flight of New Glenn? I’ll admit that SpaceX has a ways to go on getting the Starship upper stage working right, but at least they are flying a lot more.