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Elon Musk’s company, SpaceX, suffered a major setback Thursday when one of its Starship rockets exploded shortly after liftoff.
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.
Insert sad trombone sound here. The falling debris caused Florida airports to temporarily ground planes, and departures were halted in Philadelphia as well. You’d be hard-pressed to find a better epitome of Musk’s relationship to the U.S. than one of his passion projects raining trash over Americans’ heads while simultaneously hampering crucial services.
Online, the explosion was met with widespread mockery and disdain, including from Rep. Jasmine Crockett, who wasted no time invoking Musk’s bigoted suggestions that promoting diversity has made flying less safe.
In a post on X, the Texas Democrat wrote:
I’m sure Faux News won’t report on this, but how is it the guy that keeps blowing stuff up literally & figuratively, is firing people claiming that they are failures?! We know his failures have nothing to do with DEI because he doesn’t believe in it, but he’d possibly be succeeding right now if he did believe. Ya see, clearly there’s a lot of unqualified people running this thing… maybe expand the talent pool or maybe he has them focusing on their 5 things they’ve done over the week instead of the task at hand; you know not having stuff blow up and present a danger to the rest of the country.
Crockett added that it “feels like a conflict that all of a sudden he was able to launch again before the last disaster investigation was concluded,” referring to the SpaceX explosion in January that also sent debris flying far and wide.
The Federal Aviation Administration said Thursday that it is “requiring SpaceX to perform a mishap investigation into the loss of the Starship vehicle during launch operations on March 6.” The agency’s statement went on to say that “a return to flight is based on the FAA determining that any system, process, or procedure related to the mishap does not affect public safety.”
The current head of the FAA is acting Administrator Christopher Rocheleau, who was appointed by Trump in January after the previous administrator, Michael Whitaker, stepped down. Last year, Musk had publicly demanded that Whitaker resign.
As CBS News noted in January, “Musk openly complained about Whitaker and the FAA, after the agency imposed $600,000 in fines on SpaceX related to missions launched with unapproved changes.”