SpaceX Has a Major Problem: New Versions of Starship Are Performing Worse Than Older Ones

Starship, the SpaceX megarocket that's slated to bring astronauts to the Moon and perhaps one day Mars, is hitting a major snag in its development: the latest version of the spacecraft, known as Block 2, is performing worse than its predecessor, in the New York Time's analysis. On Thursday, during Starship's eighth orbital flight test, the vehicle's upper stage exploded, showering debris down over the coast of Florida. Worse, it marked the second time that the Block 2 Starship blew up; a similarly spectacular scene played out during the previous flight test in late January, when the upper stage experienced a "rapid unscheduled disassembly" over the Caribbean. The pair of botched flights could be a huge setback for SpaceX. "There's this persona that has built up around SpaceX, but you're starting to see that they're human, too," Daniel Dumbacher, a professor of engineering practice at Purdue University and a former NASA official, told the NYT. Until this year, the Elon Musk-owned ae ... Read full article.