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.
Going to space under capitalism makes no sense.
Why should space exploration need or want a profit motive?
Create an anarcho-communist society where we firstly house, feed, and educate everyone. Explore space for the pure purpose of exploration in conditions where we can all collaborate without the need of competition and destruction.
I’d much rather mine resources in an asteroid ring than on Earth. Polluting a lifeless chunk of rock in vacuum makes a lot more sense to me.
We’ve got a long way to go before we get there, but we won’t get there by waiting until we’ve the rest of society perfect first.
I have a family member that works as an engineer building parts for various spacecraft. They get excited about the possibility of finding a renewable energy source and just in general what science can gain and learn from space that will make life better on earth.
Do with that what you will, I’m neutral, I’m just providing a different perspective that I think is relevant.