It’s a bird, it’s a plane, no it’s … rocket debris!

An unmanned SpaceX Starship rocket exploded shortly after takeoff in Texas on Thursday evening. Rocket debris littered the sky, reaching as far as Philadelphia and the Bahamas.

This led to many flight delays: The debris caused 45-minute ground stops at Florida's Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport and Miami International Airport. Plus, the Philadelphia International Airport paused departures for upward of half an hour.

This is not the first time this has happened: The last launch attempt resulted in another rocket exploding in the sky.

Lol, an ‘unscheduled disassembly’: SpaceX put out a statement, acknowledging the incident. “During Starship's ascent burn, the vehicle experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly and contact was lost.”

SpaceX statement:
"During Starship's ascent burn, the vehicle experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly and contact was lost. Our team immediately began coordination with safety officials to implement pre-planned contingency responses.

We will review the data from today's flight test to better understand root cause. As always, success comes from what we learn, and today’s flight will offer additional lessons to improve Starship's reliability."

ArishMell · 70-79, M

The space industry does seem to take jargon (which I differentiate from genine technical terms) to well, at least a stratospheric level! So do many business managers and money-traders but they don't have so much scope for pretentious waffle.

rapid unscheduled disassembly ....

. No: it exploded, accidentally.

... and contact was lost.

Well, I suppose so.

"As always", eh? Routine? Let's be fair: no major human endeavour is without hazards, but have those for Starship, and the ensuing risks, been assessed fully enough? Besides, will it even be possible to identify what went wrong? I trust the wreckage will be analysed by an independent laboratory, but some will presumably be lost in very deep seas.

"pre-planned", eh? How do you plan something before you plan it?

"to improve reliability", eh? As if it's a car, perhaps. What about the safety of people living below the flight path?

Interesting that SpaceX's "statements" are almost entirely in the passive tense, as if "Nowt to do with us, guv", until the last two sentences' active tense tries a positive gloss on a very costly experiment ending in showering the region with scrap metal.

.....

On a serious point, this seems a desperate way to experiment with giant space-rockets. How many towns did this thing fly over? Or was most of it over the Gulf of Mexico (though there a hazard to ships)? I hope to God no-one was injured - or killed - by falling debris, but was there any damage to property? Will SpaceX reimburse the airports, airlines and passengers for the trouble? I cannot imagine any insurance company would touch the company for such hazards.

JimboSaturn · 56-60, M

That's a new one! I'll say, very unscheduled! as opposed to those scheduled mid-lauch disasemblies.

FreddieUK · 70-79, M

I love the way that some Americans boast about being 'straight talking' but then come up with forms of words which are anything but. Let's face it Elon, it blew up and was a FAILURE. 😂