Watching the countdown now! T-00:28:12! Will be spectacular no matter what happens! Yes, I'm excited. Not sure how the parent comment has missed what SpaceX has been doing with Dragon, Starship, Starlink, and all the rockets! Amazing.

It exploded when trying to orient for the first stage separation. And it appeared to have 5 of the 33 engines out during the first stage flight. This launch gave me very "Don't Look Up" ending vibes.

Just the opposite. This is engineer-driven testing.

I disagree - failures of manned missions set back space flight in half-decade increments. The explosion of Challenger is deeply ingrained in the American psyche. When the rocket tumbled and catastrophically failed, it's all I could think about. I doubt I'm alone.

Also, 5 of the first stage engines failed immediately, and I don't think that was planned.

Couple two major unplanned malfunctions in a single launch test with the weight of manned spaceflight riding in the balance, and it looks more like recklessness than optimism.

The cheering crowd and nonacknowledgement from the announcer of the engine failure and the obvious tumble seemed eerily reminiscent of the final scenes of Don't Look Up.

I'm not against commercial spaceflight. I am against the type of groupthink that led to Challenger, and thought the mission had echoes of that today.

Yeah. It's one thing to blow up during test firings, or when trying completely novel maneuvers like the belly flop.

It's another thing entirely to do that during stage separation. Sure, historically separation has been risky, but it's nothing novel. They didn't seem to expect the vehicle to survive past that anyways.

There would be a delay even if another vehicle was ready to go - the launch site is a wreck.

If you were thrown by the explosion (automated termination, not some catastrophic failure), then you weren't listening to any of the media around the launch. This was a successful mission, gathering data for future launches. Expectations were set appropriately, so I think it's really just your problem for not listening.

In addition, this isn't publicly funded, so it would seem if some of the people get spooked by not understanding the goals of a launch correctly, then it doesn't really matter that much.

> In addition, this isn't publicly funded, so it would seem if some of the people get spooked by not understanding the goals of a launch correctly, then it doesn't really matter that much.

It does matter that we are scattering debris over a large area for no reason. It does not matter if that was done by the flight termination system or other mechanism.

It wasn't a catastrophic failure, it was self destructed.

it's amazing how well this works for them. I think this is the main reason they can crank through development so fast. Wish this sort of development was more common.

The grand applause when they blew it up showed that it was a success.

Well to be faaaaaair, they were properly "primed" to applaud and call it a success, no matter what happened. But yeah, infinite money does that to you: you can operate in "fail fast" mode and obtain results you could not otherwise.

Yep. But you'd expect that we'd have more given how much technology has advanced and how bigger the economies are now. The recent progress is mostly due to Billionaires now.

Another possibility is: Space is too hard. So instead the focus is to analyze (ie: James Webb) instead of sending a human there.

The incentives for going to space are limited to more economic sensibility when you don't have a dick measuring contest going on between great powers.