by jmward01 on 6/19/25, 3:49 PM
The highs and lows of SpaceX have been interesting to watch. I have to wonder though if, at least partially, some of their recent troubles are partially because people are loosing passion for their mission. You can definitely see it in the reporting, and some of the comments here, that there is less willingness to give them the benefit of the doubt and while that is far from a technical measure, passion is a big part of what makes a team get through things and continue to make progress. I know for my own part there was a time where I was looking for positions at SpaceX purely because I wanted to be apart of what was going on but now you couldn't pay be enough to join them. If your key people start thinking of things as just a job instead of a world changing opportunity then your rapid iteration cycle can go from 'this is brilliant and gets things done fast so I better try harder' to 'this is stupid and I am putting in my minimum hours to get paid'.
by culebron21 on 6/19/25, 10:45 AM
The program looks similar to the Soviet N1 program, in scale, testing and failures. Korolyov was in hurry to get to the moon, and tried to assemble everything and test in actual flight. After 4 failed test flights, the program was scrapped.
This approach had worked with the R7 rocket (the Sputnik and Gagarin's booster, predecessor of Soyuz). But at this larger scale, it seems things break apart much easier if not properly tested in parts.
by jlmorton on 6/19/25, 7:21 AM
by fsh on 6/19/25, 5:59 AM
The problems with Starship make the Saturn V and STS programs even more impressive. However, I still don't get the rationale of building a rocket with such a large payload. The rocket equation will always force you to build an absolute monster compared to a series of smaller rockets. Even worse if you have to haul up a massive orbiter each time. No wonder that small/medium sized rockets (Soyuz, Atlas, Ariane, Falcon 9,...) have always been the most successful.
by StopDisinfo910 on 6/19/25, 5:51 AM
I think it’s interesting that SpaceX is struggling so much with the shift to a full flow staged combustion engine using liquid methane.
We knew from the Soviet that it was going to be really hard but after the successful flights I thought they had it in the bag.
We might be touching on the limits of SpaceX constant tweaking fail fast approach.
by aqme28 on 6/19/25, 10:33 AM
Important to note that it exploded "prior" to the planned test. That seems really really bad to me, and potentially even dangerous. It's one thing if a test fails -- tests are somewhat expected to fail occasionally. It's very very bad if it catastrophically fails before the test even starts.
by nomilk on 6/19/25, 5:43 AM
This was a entire ship (not just an engine), and nobody was hurt or killed. Is this a major or minor setback for SpaceX? Rapid unscheduled disassemblies may look spectacularly bad but may be par for the course during testing (in order to push things to their limits to learn where they break) - curious to learn how bad this one is.
by Out_of_Characte on 6/19/25, 12:22 PM
What's really vexing to me is how spacex refuses to build a triple stage rocket. Their 'reusability' adds a significant amount of mass in terms of heatshield and in terms of fuel margins for landing. Using additional stages benefits them more than saturn V. They likely thought they could get away with two stages and have them both return to the launch site, one the short way, the other the long way around. But the exclusion of a multi stage reusable architecture means that their empty mass fraction becomes a linchpin in bringing
anything into orbit.
No wonder there's a v2 and v3 with much, much larger fuel tanks and less payload.
by The_President on 6/19/25, 2:49 PM
Unsustainable rate of failures due to the associated costs. SpaceX might have to go public to capture funding opportunities, which would inevitably result in more accountability toward ensuring successful flight development. When the execution of their tech works it is highly impressive. Track record of success rate proven by the Falcon program. Does anyone have the numbers on how much these ships cost each? I've seen estimates of $100 million for a full Starship stack.
by zx8080 on 6/19/25, 7:45 AM
Why is this called "anomaly"? It's "exploded".
by quotemstr on 6/19/25, 5:56 AM
by riffraff on 6/19/25, 5:33 AM
by childintime on 6/19/25, 5:55 AM
The explosion starts at the upper part of starship, not the engine bay.
by steveBK123 on 6/19/25, 1:54 PM
Has the media coverage become more selectively focussed on the failures, or has the success rate of their move-fast-and-break-things approach really fallen off the last ~6-12 months?
by mrtksn on 6/19/25, 5:57 AM
So apparently SpaceX is building many of those all the time and the latest spotted one in development is Starship 42:
https://starship-spacex.fandom.com/wiki/Ship_42_(S42)I guess how much of a setback this is will be determined by how much damage is there on the facilities and the nature of the cause of the explosion(do they need to re-work the next 6 already being assembled so it doesn't happen again?).
by t1234s on 6/19/25, 1:47 PM
Any idea if their Prufrock tunnel boring machine (or sections of it) could fit within starship?
by ReptileMan on 6/19/25, 2:29 PM
Btw - has anyone thought how fully reusable starship eith those launch costs would revolutionize warfare. Being able to drop 50-60 tons of explosive from orbit for the cost of 1-2 million dollars while being untouchable is something I am sure that is at least part of current us military wet dreams.
by gpxyz on 6/19/25, 9:55 PM
A couple years ago, I happened to overhear a conversation at lunch between two men I gathered were SpaceX engineers. (They were talking very loudly, so it was difficult not to listen in.) Rather than discuss the mission of the company, or anything that showed passion for their job, they instead spent most of the lunch talking about how they were making “day in the life” TikToks and were trying to increase their follower counts, then about how they would drive 150+mph to Vegas since they could afford any speeding ticket if they got pulled over. Really struck me as a red flag for the company that their employees were much more concerned about their own social status than anything they were working on. I suppose incidents like this may well be the result of these attitudes becoming commonplace.
by eqvinox on 6/19/25, 7:36 AM
The pad might actually have less damage than one might assume; that explosion started at the top. The bottom parts of the pad will mostly have heat & fire damage, but not explosion?
(It'll still be fucked, I just wouldn't expect a crater?)
by Analemma_ on 6/19/25, 5:28 AM
Pretty bad: it blew up on the pad before the static fire test even started. I can’t imagine this provides much in the way of useful information, and it looks like the pad was completely destroyed as well.
by gcanyon on 6/19/25, 11:11 AM
I'm imagining Elon like Jeff Bridges in Iron Man, shouting at his team, "The Apollo program built a heavy lifter rocket in the sixties, with a box of scraps!"
by stevage on 6/19/25, 1:30 PM
by ludicrousdispla on 6/19/25, 10:14 AM
by selivanovp on 6/19/25, 6:12 AM
It looks like a fuel tank had a leak.
by chasd00 on 6/19/25, 12:23 PM
Looks like a production defect. Will be interesting to see what QA process failed.
by d--b on 6/19/25, 7:28 AM
Move fast and break huge things
by seydor on 6/19/25, 7:53 AM
Maybe it's time to consider a smaller Starship
by beshur on 6/19/25, 1:01 PM
Well, it clearly says "Static fire"
by rapsey on 6/19/25, 5:51 AM
It seems starship still has a long way to go.
by amai on 6/19/25, 7:40 PM
Biggest reusable explosion machine?
by goku12 on 6/19/25, 11:04 AM
I see that comments mentioning the 'move fast and break stuff' philosophy are downvoted quickly here. While I don't have any direct knowledge of the Starship design and the SpaceX work culture, I do have years of experience in both the launch vehicle industry as well as the software industry. I feel that the concerns with this approach are dismissed too easily. It's true that SpaceX has been an industry disruptor and a trend setter, especially with the Falcon series launchers. But Falcon and Starship are two fundamentally different vehicles and the success of one doesn't guarantee the success of the other. And there may be good reasons why the Starship is struggling when the Falcon 9 became a success that's unlike any before.
To start with, Falcon 9 and Starship may share some technologies. But they use different engines, engine cycles, propellants, structural materials and dynamics and even manufacturing processes. SS and Falcon are more dissimilar than any other two launchers I've seen from a single company. There are a lot of design data and procedures that you simply can't carry over from one to the other. The only thing you can realistically carry over is the zealousness with which the design and production quality is enforced. But problems like the repeated failure of the Starship fuel lines raise questions about that zealousness. (In my experience, a traditional space industry facing such issues during the development phase would simply throw out the propellant circuit design and start from scratch, paying more attention to its structural integrity. Frankly, I've seen worse. But that approach is present in the Raptor design. Look how different v1, v2 an v3 are.)
I think everyone here knows that the 'move fast and break things' culture has its roots in the agile development methodology from the silicon valley. Meanwhile, the traditional space development methodology has its roots at NASA. It's even more rigorous than the waterfall methodology used in the software industry, with numerous levels of elaborate reviews for designs, test plans, tests results, integration, schedules, status and even the documentation. From what I understood, the agile methodology is optimized to maximize revenue in a project where the underlying tech stack is reasonably well understood and proven. But it's a poor match for a project where the costs, stakes, complexity, subsystem interdependence, uncertainty in subsystem reliability and lack of engineering margins are all very high. Space launcher is the poster child of such projects. Agile is not even suitable for software projects where you're developing something novel and complex.
The main problem with Agile is the 'let's push to production and see what fails' approach. I'm aware that there are elaborate QA procedures to augment the methodology. But the project is much more tolerant to QA failures. Unlike that, you can't simply leave a flaw in a launcher or its subsystem design and hope to resolve it later. Such flaws are technical debts that will stay hidden for a while and then fail spectacularly on a random day, like the holes in a Swiss cheese. Remember that subsystem interdependence is very high. Failures cascade in ways you couldn't have dreamt of. And the required corrections are elaborate, costly, time consuming and often spanning multiple subsystems. The only reasonable way to manage so much uncertainty is to design meticulously for all foreseeable failures from the start, validating those assumptions at every step of the way (This is why they sometimes throw away faulty designs entirely). And that takes a lot of time and focus. The current approach of 'we will launch in one month to make up for this failure' makes me a bit uncomfortable.
I'm not trying to dismiss SpaceX's approach outright. The biggest aspect of any launcher development is the management of complexity and uncertainty. Perhaps they will find a good way to do that without slowing down. They sure have a lot of smart and hardworking employees. But if I were asked to manage one again, I will choose the NASA style again over the agile style. I'm not smart enough to manage with any other method, the level of uncertainties and complexities I expect from a mid-heavy launcher design, much less something like the Starship. Remember that the management culture was one of the hottest topics in the investigation of the Challenger disaster. Perhaps it's a good idea to revisit the findings of that investigation, as well as the venerable and effective Apollo design philosophy.
by 2OEH8eoCRo0 on 6/19/25, 2:41 PM
Now they can't even load propellant. They're going backwards!
by LightBug1 on 6/19/25, 4:08 PM
lol
by randomcarbloke on 6/19/25, 8:12 AM
In 2020 Elon said they'd build 100 Starships a year, last year (2024) he said they would build 1 per day.
I have to ask if the world needs 365 $100mm fireworks each year.
by seydor on 6/19/25, 5:38 AM
It's an explosion. It would be an anomaly if it happened rarely
by senectus1 on 6/19/25, 6:22 AM
Anomaly?
The thing detonated from the top down... that was spectacular. Anomaly doesn't really describe that very well.
by _Yguy_ on 6/19/25, 6:11 AM
"rapid unscheduled disassembly"
by shmoe on 6/19/25, 6:20 AM
SpaceX supporters can only call this "moving fast, breaking stuff" for so long as the entire program regresses in on itself in terms of milestones. This was never easy, but the Falcon program sure made it look so.
by dcminter on 6/19/25, 11:26 AM
At the risk of being a bit Polly-Anna-ish this might be a good thing in the medium term for the project. If this has the same root cause as the in-flight failures of v2, they at least have a chance to analyse the failed components directly instead of having to infer purely from instrumentation what happened.