Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly

Or...

According to a report from the New York Times, the explosions "are a step backward in SpaceX’s development process, as the flights could not even repeat the successes of earlier test flights, and they perhaps show that the company’s engineers are not as infallible as fans of the company sometimes like to think."

According to Daniel Dumbacher, a former NASA official who is now a professor of engineering practice at Purdue University, "There’s this persona that has built up around SpaceX, but you’re starting to see that they’re human, too."

As the Times' Kenneth Chang is reporting, there is a growing concern since the two latest launches "... which both failed less than 10 minutes after liftoff, were an upgraded design."

"Discouragingly, they were less successful than an older version of Starship that flew last year. Three previous test flights successfully coasted halfway around the world, survived re-entry through the atmosphere over the Indian Ocean, and then simulated landings in the waters off the west coast of Australia," Chang reported before noting, "In addition, the failures of the seventh and eighth flights occurred at about the same part of the flight, and both appeared to originate near the engines of the second-stage spacecraft. That suggests that SpaceX did not successfully diagnose and solve the problem. It could point to a significant design flaw in the upgraded Starship."

I’ll readily admit my Google-fu is not strong (I’m more of a card catalog/bibliography of bibliographies guy), but I can’t for the life of me find any reference to the “rapid unscheduled disassembly” of rocket boosters I know the early space program had. Hey, in those days it was rocket science. 

But I don’t recall any Saturn boosters exploding on the launch pad, or in flight. And if they did, NASA figured it out and put human beings on the moon in successive trips.

And then we turned it over to “private enterprise” (as we used to call it), because we were all told anything government could do, business could do better.

A-HEM!!!

SpaceX is just getting worse. On the government dime, and on contracts that, SURPRISE!, are NOT riddled with “waste, fraud, and abuse.” At least Elmo and DOGE haven’t found any, and as our clueless Speaker says: “The data doesn’t lie.” Except that’s why courts have rules of evidence; because not all data is equally reliable. And that’s why we used to have inspectors general; because the data is never what the liars say it is.

Oh, don’t get me started….

I mean, it’s not like Elmo had to reinvent the wheel, here. He didn’t reinvent the Tesla, he just marketed it, and proved P.T. Barnum right. A car that can be set on fire by water, and which can’t open its doors without an electrical circuit or a manual override? What NHTSA idiot let THAT deathtrap on the road? And why is it still there? (My car unlocks the doors electronically, but the door latch, inside and out, is as mechanical as the first car I owned over 50 years ago. My car has an electronic key, but if that or the car’s electronics fail, it has a mechanical key to open the door (the hood latch is inside the car. There’s a reason my car is considered one of the safest makes on the road.)

Elmo didn’t have to reinvent the Saturn 5 either, but he can’t get something similar off the ground. And honestly, you can’t make this part up:

SpaceX's Starship spacecraft and Super Heavy rocket - collectively referred to as Starship - is intended to be fully reusable, the company says.

How’s that working out for ya?

I’m not saying Spacex is doomed to failure; I’m just saying they aren’t exactly dancing with success. And considering the “success” of the Tesla, it’s…concerning.  Considering that debris field may one day not be in the area they planned for…is even more concerning.