Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

“woke” is the new caravan.

Is it negotiation when the other party actually wants to shoot the hostage?

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

Not all heroes wear capes.

🎶 Those boots were made for mockin’ 🎵

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.

Schmidt just says fuck it, opens a tea shop.

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

This year has been the longest three days of putin’s life.

Meanwhile over at truth Social, the former president is busy confessing to crimes.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

You are so fucked. Still, I wish you the best of luck.

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

Republicans don’t trust women.

Prediction: the GOP will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.

Historically it was a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

This really is a full service blog.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

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Reader Interactions

147Comments

  1. 1.

    Shalimar

    I want SpaceX to do well even though I loathe the twit who owns 45% of it.  This isn’t good.

  6. 6.

    Victor Matheson

    @Shalimar: I am 100% with you there. Affordable and reliable rocketry is an important good, and it would be nice if the world had it even if Musk is one of the big beneficiaries of it.

  13. 13.

    dmsilev

    Most rockets go boom or similar on the first launch test. And this monstrosity is really really complex, so not at all surprising that it didn’t work quite right. So, meh, whatever. Enjoy the snarking on Elon Musk’s Hellsite.

  14. 14.

    twbrandt

    “Rapid unscheduled disassembly” is certainly one way to put it.

     

    As if the flight test was not exciting enough, Starship experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly before stage separation
    — SpaceX (@SpaceX) April 20, 2023

  16. 16.

    bbleh

    There’s a … whatchacallit … meta-something … meta-for? here, right

    @twbrandt:  “rapid unscheduled disassembly” is something that happens to me about every other afternoon.  This is … more.

  19. 19.

    Matt McIrvin

    I’ve wondered for a while if Starship is the program SpaceX keeps going to keep Elon Musk out of the business that pays the bills.

    It concerns me that NASA’s Artemis program chose a Starship-derived lunar lander and I’ve been wondering if there are plans to change that. I haven’t heard a lot about it lately and it always seemed like the sketchiest part of the project.

  20. 20.

    Dangerman

    Oh, sure, Brilliant. Let’s test a new rocket on 4/20 when everyone is higher than shit.

  24. 24.

    kindness

    From what I read, this rocket is using a new technique in separating the 1st stage from the 2nd.  In this case the 2nd stage failed to separate and (apparently) when the 2nd stage’s rockets ignited it exploded the whole thing.

    Needz moar drawing boards.

  25. 25.

    Llelldorin

    I’m surprised the range officer let that go as long as they did. That flight hit “we are not going to space today,” at about the 3m mark.

  26. 26.

    The Moar You Know

    The range officer blew it up when it was obvious (and it was obvious for quite a while) that the rocket was just spinning out of control and wouldn’t separate.  That’s why the put the self-destruct stuff in rockets in the first place.

    The weird thing is that it would not separate.  That’s pretty much a rocketry 101 job and SpaceX has not had a problem with it before.

  27. 27.

    Betty Cracker

    I immediately looked to the east to see the kerblooey cloud, but this was launched in Texas.

  28. 28.

    Dangerman

    @kindness:  In this case the 2nd stage failed to separate and (apparently) when the 2nd stage’s rockets ignited it exploded the whole thing.

    Pure guess, but I’m gonna say Range Safety Officer pushed the big red button labelled “Boom”. Looked out of control for a moment.

  29. 29.

    dmsilev

    @kindness: No, the second stage never lit. The “flight termination system” triggered, which is rocket-speak for “we told the thing to blow itself up, and it did”.

  30. 30.

    Bugboy

    From SpaceX Twitter:

    …Starship experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly…

    Pretty amazing way to say “it blew up”?

  34. 34.

    Matt McIrvin

    All that said… yeah, this kind of thing is pretty normal for an early test launch of a rocket. You expect some of them to blow up. One of the big problems with the Shuttle program was that the whole project depended on fantasy assumptions that that wouldn’t happen– they couldn’t even launch without a crew, and after the first few flights there was no escape system.

  36. 36.

    MobiusKlein

    @kindness: ​
     
    I imagine the RCA (root cause analysis) board will be busy for many months.
    For the rest of the commentariate, it’s way too early to point a finger at what went wrong.

  38. 38.

    jonas

    @dmsilev: That’s pretty much what I’ve been reading as well. Folks who know rocket engineering say that this was actually a pretty remarkable flight even if it did break up eventually. It’s not uncommon for the first couple of test shots to just blow up on the launch pad.

  41. 41.

    Tony G

    Must be a glitch in the Full Self Rocketing software.  It will be fixed by the next upgrade.

  42. 42.

    Layer8Problem

    “No, y’see the problem was ALL YOU HATERZ who aren’t showing Elon enough love for his mad engineering skilz!!  If you had believed, it would still be up there!”

  44. 44.

    Tony G

    @Shalimar: Should a profit-seeking corporation, which is incentivized to cut corners on safety precautions be building and launching rockets?  I know that we must obey the Invisible Hand, but still …

  45. 45.

    Layer8Problem

    @Baud:  “Due to overwhelming customer demand, we’ve extended our innovating past Ludicrous Mode with our new Boom Mode!”

  47. 47.

    The Kropenhagen Interpretation

    Starship experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly

    Things go up, they come down in smaller pieces. No one can explain these things.

  48. 48.

    Shalimar

    @Tony G: They have done a better job than any other organization the last decade.  I’m with you.  I would prefer NASA to remain in control of the whole design and build process.  But that ship sailed a long time ago.

  49. 49.

    The Kropenhagen Interpretation

    Starship is also a lofty title for a vehicle that only has a hope of reaching one star, the only star we ever could have reached.

  51. 51.

    Maxim

    My brain keeps trying to read the first part of the headline in the photo as “SpaceX’s unscrewed Starship” which is not a phrase I really want to interpret.

  53. 53.

    Timill

    @jonas: Yup: it didn’t destroy the launch pad, and the booster actually lit enough engines and flew pretty much as planned.

    Boom later is pretty much expected, so a good result all round.

  56. 56.

    Seanly

    I’m reminded of the story my materials science professor told about early US rocketry. In his telling, admirals & generals wanted the BEST steel for the piping in the rockets in the 1950s. Stainless steel was the most expensive so of course it must be the best! But the material got brittle at cold temperatures  such as when rocket fuels are pressurized. Then they try pumping cold fuels at high pressures and the pipes burst and kablooey.
    I’m not sure how true his story was as I think he was trying to impart that you need to pick the metal as balancing strength, ductility and behavior in the expected environmental conditions.

  61. 61.

    UncleEbeneezer

    @Baud: Speaking of “Woke”, I’m reading a great book titled Mothers of Conservatism: Women & The Postwar Right by Michelle M. Nickerson that chronicles the rise of Housewife Populism in Southern California in the 1950’s and chapter two is notes that when looking at their own words for what drove them, one of the most common metaphors that comes up again and again is that of a great political awakening (to the threats of Communism, Progressive Education, Integration etc.). They don’t use the word “woke” but it’s all essentially the same damn concept of suddenly becoming aware and spurred to action.  They also created the template for the school board bullying that we are now seeing about woke-ness, all across the country.  The War on (Liberal, Racial, Trans etc.) Woke-ness, literally started from (Conservative) Woke-ness.

  62. 62.

    The Kropenhagen Interpretation

    @UncleEbeneezer: Republicans have been railing against the hottest current term for basic decency since time immemorial. Plus ça change, it’s all the same shit. 

    Fuckem.

  63. 63.

    Edmund dantes

    @Tony G: the us military and NASA had a fair few rockets blow up on the launchpad. This has nothing to do with that. There is a reason the joke is “this is not rocket science”.

  64. 64.

    Jeffg166

    Reminds me of being a kid in the 50s, watching all the rockets launched at Cape Canaveral blow up.

  66. 66.

    Ruckus

    @Layer8Problem:

    “mad engineering skilz!”

    I must have missed that part of his character. Maybe I wasn’t looking hard or deep enough. And here I was thinking that hard or deep wouldn’t really work in this situation….

  67. 67.

    Edmund dantes

    If you watch the video from spacex’s livestream. Around the 45:34 mark you can see one of the parts of the ship actually explodes and throws off derbis. It was near where the hydraulic control box was for the engines. So a good chance something went wrong near there.  Also they kicked up a ton of debris at liftoff that might have damaged some engines right at the start.

  74. 74.

    Elizabelle

    Good morning.  Here’s the SpaceX Youtube replay.  Action begins around 43 minutes.

    Background sounds remind you that this is not all about Elon.  Also, impressed with the female announcer.  Talk about unflappable.  Just after 48 minutes.  Rocket blows itself up.

    “I want to remind everyone that everything after clearing the tower was *BOOM* icing on the cake.”

    Also, incredible video from the starship.  Such improvements in the intervening years.

  78. 78.

    ArchTeryx

    Everyone’s having a good laugh over the Rapid Unplanned Disassembly of the Starship rocket, but this test almost certainly qualifies as a “successful failure.”

    Apparently they were testing a new passive stage separation system, relying on aerodynamic forces instead of explosive bolts. It failed miserably and the rocket blowed up real nice. But before it blew up, they got data that hopefully will tell them the flaws that can be corrected next time round.

  82. 82.

    UncleEbeneezer

    @Patricia Kayden: No lies told.  Seriously, one major down side of really paying attention to all the Isms/Phobias and GOP Fuckery is that it really can have detrimental effects on sleep.

    No Rest For The Wioked

  83. 83.

    Frankensteinbeck

    I loathe Musk, but I’m in the group of not making fun of something that’s actually normal.  You do tests because some of them fail.

    @scav:

    Live by the hype, die by the hype.

    But here, you have a point.  By pretending he’s god, Elon invites criticism for having human limits.

  87. 87.

    Ken

    @Seanly: John Clark’s Ignition! has lots of stories along those lines. There was a lot of experimentation, and many booms, as they figured out ways to keep the fuels and oxidizers from eating through the lines.

  89. 89.

    Delk

    That horrible furniture CEO lady had a pretty good boom. But this boom might be slightly better.

  91. 91.

    Bill Arnold

    Meanwhile, from “Teslarati”, a headline worthy of Russian media:
    SpaceX Starship completes first successful test flight (Joey Klender, April 20, 2023)

    SpaceX’s Starship completed its first successful flight test with an incredible liftoff at South Padre Island, Texas, after years of testing and regulatory barriers.
    …
    After the launch, the expectations were for Starship to separate and continue its path to space, while the Super Heavy Booster would return to Earth.
    Several engines were lost, and the rocket suffered “a rapid unscheduled disassembly before stage separation.”

  93. 93.

    Bill Arnold

    @Frankensteinbeck:

    I loathe Musk, but I’m in the group of not making fun of something that’s actually normal.

    They (well, some of them) declared success. That’s mainly what’s being mocked.

  94. 94.

    Burnspbesq

    @MobiusKlein:

    For the rest of the commentariate, it’s way too early to point a finger at what went wrong.

    Dunno about that. All of Leon’s companies seem to be not-so-good at the basic blocking and tackling of assembling things well enough that they do what they’re designed and intended to do. That’s a corporate-culture issue, and corporate culture starts at the top.

  95. 95.

    scav

    @Bill Arnold: Yeah, those “regulatory barriers” sure put a crimp in their drive to test explode their gizmo.  Always be pushing the political agenda.

  98. 98.

    Bill Arnold

    @Baud:

    The flight situation has developed not necessarily to SpaceX’s advantage.

    Ooh. Elon “Emperor of Mars” Musk, indeed!

  108. 108.

    Timill

    @Baud: SpaceX have been doing launches of the Starship second stage for a couple of years now, which uses the same methane engines as the booster.

    Eventually you have to light the blue touch paper and see what breaks.

  113. 113.

    The Moar You Know

    So the Falcon 9 used the same separation tech?

    @Baud: forgive me, I missed your point entirely.  Why didn’t they try it on a Falcon 9?  I have no idea, but my guess would be that every Falcon 9 in the pipeline already has a mission and they didn’t want to fuck up the flow by pulling one out to test.  Would’ve been a lot cheaper though.

  117. 117.

    ETtheLibrarian

    said with an eyeroll emoji……But wasn’t it supposed to be a success because it got off the ground?

  118. 118.

    BlueGuitarist

    @ArchTeryx:

    @Baud

    NYT, or maybe DougJ, conveying the idea of “successful failure”
    “SpaceX’s Starship rocket launched but fell short of its most ambitious goals when it exploded minutes into its flight”
    Should these be nominated as a rotating tag

    together

    “Rapid unscheduled disassembly”
    “fell short of its most ambitious goals”

    or separately?

  120. 120.

    Cameron

    So all those patriotic Texas radio stations started playing, “Oh, say can you see/by Elon’s early light,” and I thought I wasn’t hearing it right.

  121. 121.

    Burnspbesq

    @Bill Arnold:

    Well, the results were in line with analysts’ expectations, but most measures were off by double digits year-on-year. 19 percent gross margin is pretty bad for a car company. Teslarati is considered a fanboi site, so their chosen spin is unsurprising.

    And the much-ballyhooed rollout of the “magic dock” that allows non-Teslas to charge at Superchargers appears dead in the water, with no increase in the number of stations so equipped in the two months since the first 11 went online.

  122. 122.

    Kelly

    Night before last at 4:45 am my 86 year old Mom woke up, decided to check the time and weather on her cell phone. Weather app wasn’t working so she rebooted her phone. Accidentally dialed me. I reach for my phone, knock it to the floor. By the time I try to pick up my phone shows Mom called but she’s not answering. I ring back. Not available. That’s due to the reboot in progress but I don’t know that. Fortunately she lives next door. Put on my big rain coat and flip flops. Accidently dial my brother as I put my phone in my pocket. Explain to him that Mom called me and isn’t answering as I walk over in the cold, dark rain. All is well. I managed to get back to sleep. My brother, a retired construction worker is usually up at 5 anyway.

  123. 123.

    Roger Moore

    @Bill Arnold:

    It looks factual, but they’re being overly generous in a lot of ways.  The one that stands out to me is that they’re focusing on non-GAAP measures rather than GAAP.  They do mention the GAAP numbers, but given how flexible GAAP is, using non-standard accounting makes me nervous.

  124. 124.

    Roger Moore

    @Burnspbesq:

    Yeah, their sales grew, but the increased sales came from lowering prices and thus their profitability.  Their year-on-year profits were pretty flat, so their increased sales aren’t helping the bottom line.

    That’s not to say these are doom and gloom numbers.  Tesla has managed to boost itself to become routinely profitable and it’s now an established player in the automotive marketplace.  If it were priced like any other car manufacturer with its market position- a solid if not major producer with OK profit- that would be one thing.  But its share price seems to assume it will soon become a dominant manufacturer while being able to maintain its old profit margin.  The numbers don’t support that idea at all.

  128. 128.

    Shana

    @Delk: I assume you mean that the lady is horrible, not the furniture? Because I think the Herman Miller furniture, on the whole, is pretty cool, Eames chairs, George Nelson designs from the 60s. Lots of cool stuff there.

  130. 130.

    Sebastian

    @Shalimar:

    That’s the narrative that SpaceX pushes. Their reusable rockets are anything but, the cost for refurbished rockets is $60m ($80m for a new one). Elmo advertised $6m for refurbished launches.

  131. 131.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @Baud: Why wouldn’t they first do a test run with a smaller rocket? Or did they?

    Numerous tests with the second stage (vs the full stack with the first-stage) but mostly to work out landing it under power, so it never had to go above 30,000 feet or so and only used the three sea-level Raptor engines. IIRC the booster has only had one static fire of all 33 engines, for a few seconds while the rocket never left the pad.

    If the problem really was a newish passive method for stage separation, it might have been more prudent to test that with a full stack and a second-stage with just enough fuel to get a couple hundred miles downrange and land on one of the recovery ships. Put the other recovery ship a few miles downrange and after separation, have the booster blast back and (attempt to) land on it. That tests three critical operations with one launch. But hey, I’m not even a bottle-rocket scientist…

     

    @Shalimar: I want SpaceX to do well even though I loathe the twit who owns 45% of it.

    Musk took Robert Zubrin’s “Mars Direct” concept (with RZ’s blessing AFAICT) and threw his bazillions into making it so, including hiring a bunch of real rocket scientists to do the engineering. Seems like a reasonable and mostly non-destructive (RUDs excepted!) way to spend his cash on something that might just be worthwhile “For All Mankind.” ;^D

    Yeah, I think he’s a prick, but I’m rooting for SpaceX and Starship. Go back to the ultimate inspiration (Heinlein’s The Man Who Sold The Moon, 1950) and you’ll find that his ur-Muskrat, corporate megacapitalist Delos D. Harriman, was no more a rocket scientist (and about as big a prick**) as Lone Skum; he just had this idée fixe of flying to the Moon.

    ** As I recall it, for budgetary reasons the Moon rocket ends up being launched from somewhere in the Midwest where the discarded lower stages could come down on populated regions; Harriman’s response is to offer to pay off anyone who loses property (or, one imagines, life and/or limb) to the re-entering pieces – a 21st-century robber-baron solution if I ever saw one.

    This isn’t good.

    But it ain’t too bad. I’m old enough to remember when Sputnik went up (4 Oct 1957) and that December the embarrassed US rushed its orbital launcher onto a Florida launch pad for a December launch. The insufficiently tested, special-built** Vanguard rose three feet from the pad, keeled over, crashed and exploded. (The grapefruit-size satellite landed some distance away and was later tracked down by its “meep-meep-meep” radio signals. IIRC one national newspaper called it “Kaputnik.”)

    ** Von Braun at Redstone Arsenal said they were ready to put up a satellite early in 1957 with a Jupiter-C rocket (a Redstone short-range ballistic missile, essentially a V-2 on steroids, with solid-fuel upper stages) but the Eisenhower Administration shied away from using a military-derived vehicle for a non-miltary scientific project scheduled for the Internationl Geophysical Year of 1956-57, and opted for the civilian Vanguard project instead. After “Kaputnik” Wernher and The Boys In The Bund got their shot (so to speak) and launched Explorer I on the first try on 1 February 1958. (ETA: The Jupiter-C configuration was not designed for satellite launching but to put a payload on a high (~600-mi) trajectory and then down in the ocean ~3000 miles downrange, to test the ablative heat shielding for the new ICBMs.)

    One thing I noticed during the flight was that 3 of the booster engines in the outer ring of 20 weren’t burning. Were I SpaceX or Mr Skum, I would be a lot more concerned about that than about a cockamamie passive stage-separation protocol. (Although the non-burning engines did not fail catastrophically and destroy the stack as did engines in the Soviet N-1 tests.)

  132. 132.

    Eduardo

    @Elizabelle:

    Impressive, thank you for the link.

    Been following SpaceX for like a decade now, remembering now all the failed attempts to recover the first stage, and the unbelievable feeling when it succeeded the first time.

    Rooting for this great American company.  Not about Musk, indeed.

  133. 133.

    Sebastian

    @Eduardo:

    If you knew about the corporate culture at SpaceX and the people they hire in management (witnessed it firsthand) you’d be singing a different tune, my friend.

  134. 134.

    RobertDSC-iPhone 8

    Parts my company processed were part of that rocket. Kinda sad it went down the way it did.

    The last 3 companies I’ve worked at have had connections with SpaceX, so I’ve seen things here and there over the years. Still hate the owner’s guts, though.

  136. 136.

    Another Scott

    @West of the Rockies:

    Space.com has a story with video.

    I heard a little NPR news blurb about it, with a crowd counting down the numbers to launch. It was very weird – almost cult-like.

    It looks like several things went wrong – some engines not starting, some going out; engines not shutting off when they were supposed to; severe loss of control in the last minute or so (look at the speed numbers in the video in the last minute).

    They’ve got lots of things to figure out before they stick people in that thing…

    But, it’s part of the process of figuring out new things.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  138. 138.

    TriassicSands

    Despite blowing up, this “test” was a success. But I don’t believe a Saturn V rocket ever exploded and shouldn’t that be the model of what “success” is? I guess standards have slipped in the last half century.

  139. 139.

    No One You Know

    @bbleh: “‘rapid unscheduled disassembly’ is something that happens to me about every other afternoon.”

    Nominated for rotating tag!

  143. 143.

    Odie Hugh Manatee

    The look on Elon’s mug when it blew up was priceless… OK, it cost a shitload but it was worth it to see him brought back to ground for a bit. I was rooting for 4:20 on the timer just for karma.

    My wife said that it’s sad that Elon couldn’r last more than four minutes…

  144. 144.

    Keith P.

    The launch was still largely a success – the booster launched and got several minutes of metrics along with a failure point (separation) to investigate.  Some of the engines didn’t fire, but I’m not sure if they were intended to or not, since at least some of the Falcon engines are optimized for vacuum (although I wouldn’t expect any of those to be on the booster).  Regardless, that’s 32 separate series of engine data, so lots of samples to figure out where breakdowns are most likely to occur.  Once the separation failed and it was going to keep spinning, it makes sense to push the big red button and blow it up (assuming that was a self-destruct).

    And these ships are getting cheaper to build as they just keep cranking more and more of them out, so that it didn’t blow up on the pad, Roman Roy-style, was a good day IMO.

  145. 145.

    KrackenJack

    @The Moar You Know: They have the actual rocket scientists, of course, but rotationally unlatching components that are moving through the atmosphere at 8000 km/s seems like a tough engineering problem. And costly to test.

    Maybe they should just go with press-fit to hold the stages together.

  146. 146.

    Sebastian

    @Eduardo:

    Like with all Musk ventures you have highly talented and passionate people who are being worked to the breaking point and the management (at least all I had to interact) are raging assholes.

  147. 147.

    Tehanu

    @Shalimar:  I want SpaceX to do well even though I loathe the twit who owns 45% of it. This isn’t good.

    Couldn’t agree more.  What a shame.

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