SpaceX’s Starship spacecraft exploded on Thursday minutes after lifting off from Texas, dooming an attempt to deploy mock satellites in the second consecutive failure this year for Elon Musk’s Mars rocket program.
Several videos on social media showed fiery debris streaking through the dusk skies near south Florida and the Bahamas after Starship’s breakup in space, which occurred shortly after it began to spin uncontrollably with its engines cut off, a SpaceX livestream of the mission showed.
The failure comes just more than a month after the company’s seventh Starship flight also ended in an explosive failure. The back-to-back mishaps occurred in early mission phases that SpaceX has easily surpassed previously, indicating serious setbacks for a program Musk has sought to speed up this year.
There is NOTHING cool about SpaceX and there never was.
Musk claimed it was “Plan B” but there is no fucking Plan B, if we destroy the earth that is it!!
Musk and Trump are the idiots in Don’t look up! And the movie nailed it!
The coolest thing about Space X is that it knocked about 100 million dollars off the cost of putting a satellite in orbit. More, if you consider the possibility of multiple small satellites sharing a launch to a similar orbit.
This enabled many, many small research companies to begin developing satellites for Earth and atmospheric imaging which is advancing our ability to collect precise data about things like greenhouse gas emissions.
Fuck Musk, absolutely, but a lower barrier to entry to putting things in space absolutely has utility.
Have you actually seen how many Starlink satellites surround Earth? There little room for more. Source
Do…do you think those dots are to scale?
That image is so incredibly silly.
First, there are fewer than 20k starlink satellites, each about 3m long. If you put 20k 3m objects on the surface of the planet would you think that they were taking up all the room? Of course not. And the amount of free space available in LEO is even greater than at the surface.
Second, if they had made the “satellites” on that image to scale, you wouldn’t be able to see them at all. The approximate surface area of LEO where the satellites are is like 8x10^8 km^2. They aren’t running out of space.
tl;dr: the satellites aren’t “running out of room”
Is that something Musk claims? Because you know Musk is full of shit right?
I wouldn’t be surprised if he compares to the space shuttle, which was always infamous for being extremely expensive.
No that’s what data claims, I wrote a paper about this last year and did a bunch of research for it.