In Which We Begin To Wonder Whether Elon Musk Is Not Quite The Fine Engineer He Claims To Be: Unscheduled Anomaly For A Sixth Time, After Liftoff(?).

Of course, as we always say -- space is. . . hard. And at any moment, any one small thing can undo years of good work.

Even so, the Falcon Heavy engine was (supposedly) pretty well-vetted -- tested and true. Yet again, last evening we learned that the second stage firing caused the craft to lose attitude control, and then the entire upper section disintegrated over the Gulf [OF MEXICO, boys!]. This was supposed to be the year that Elon would accelerate his launch schedule, in prep for. . . yup, boots on Mars. These similar -- back to back -- failures in the second stage engines. . . portend a rather persistent design problem. Something is breaking after Max G. And it seems Elon's team doesn't really know what it is -- or how to even begin fixing it. Yikes. Here's the UK Guardian on it on this "morning after" / hangover:

. . .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. . . .

Well. . . forgive me, but maybe his work at PayPal didn't really qualify as "rocket science". And maybe -- just maybe -- having a daddy who owned an Apartheid era emerald mining company, while he lived in a barricaded whytes only high end enclave. . . didn't really prepare him for life in the real world. . . and maybe. . . it is not all that's messed up, about him, here.

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