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setting aside snark, the fact that these things happen with some regularity is a good reminder that going on 70 years these things are pretty hard to engineer/build or build and not blow up. https://t.co/tsEuMLXAWb

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) March 13, 2024

Without resorting to Google, NASA stopped blowing up rockets very early in. I say that, but their first two manned programs (Mercury and Gemini) used missile boosters (Redstone and Titan.  IIRC, Mercury used two different boosters. Can’t remember the name of the other one. I used to know this stuff.🫤). Saturn 1 and then 5 were the first built specifically to lift the heavy payloads for travel to the moon and back. (It was it 1-B? I used to know these things…)

Don’t remember any rockets blowing up at Canaveral/Kennedy. I do remember a lot of sci-fi in my childhood about free enterprise taking over space travel (Kubrick’s Pan Am shuttle to the space station was not . outlier). Turns out it’s too complicated and expensive for capitalism. Governments can wait until they have it right. Capitalism wants an ROI that R & D can’t always provide quickly enough. Could be some things are too hard for private industry to handle.

Certainly space travel is dangerous, from launch to return, and everything in between. Space is inimical to human life, no matter what “Star Trek” told you. Even government blew up rockets until they figured it out. What’s interesting to me is that private interests seem to be reinventing the wheel. And struggling with the concept.