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He does force them to cut corners for the sake of more headlines though

Blame the poster. The CNN article itself doesn't have Musk in the headline and barely mentions him at all (there is one quote near the end).

EDIT

Or maybe don't blame the poster. From the URL and web archives, it appears CNN may have changed the title.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/18/world/elon-musk-spacex-starship-launch-scn/index.html

… throw a bunch of money at a company because he ~~’s obsessed with Mars.~~ wanted to justify sending money to some Russian arm dealers friends.

He did insist they slap an X on it tho. Thats gotta be worth something, right.

Actually kinda really successful 👍 All 33 engines were firing, the hot staging was successful. On both the first and second stages, it looks like the automatic FTS (flight termination system) was triggered. That would happen if it veered too far off of it's approved flight path (don't need it coming down over a populated region.) The only thing that didn't happen that I was hopeful for was atmospheric re-entry - we really need to see how that heat shield works in practice.

The launch achieved most of its objectives, but it was supposed to fly farther and splash down near Hawaii. It was a success in that the 32 engines fired together, and the ship achieved separation, and there will be plenty of data about what went wrong.

But some things did go wrong, so you can't say it was an "absolute" success. Both the superheavy and the starship were lost. Rocket science is slow and expensive progress. It's only a failure if we abandon the project. But it is disingenuous to say that everything worked out as intended.

...but it exploded before dinner.

Well that tweet is being composed with the aid of kilos of ketamine as we speak

The space lasers took it out probably

On test flights, having something go terribly wrong is expected. This is the second test flight of a brand new vehicle system which also happens to be the largest and most complicated vehicle ever made. They also have half a dozen more vehicles already made and waiting to fly, each with improvements learned in manufacturing the previous one. They are behind their original schedule, for sure, but this mission was a huge success for SpaceX considering all of the things that did work.

It would be very weird, if we could verify they weren't shills or bots. Insane and desperate people. It was only "interesting" years ago, before he exposed himself as a fraud (and tortured animals during failed testing).