‘Tis a fine explosion but sure ’tis no liftoff, English

So Edolf’s latest Starship test went… poorly, and, as you can see, the cult is already trying to downplay it; somehow the fact that it blew up before launch is apparently less bad than it blowing up once it was in the air.  And I know they always try and spin these cases as “well at least now we know what needs more work so it was still useful”, but you still can’t call it successful. Rockets shouldn’t blow up on the launch pad, nor indeed at any other point. By this point the company should know what the fuck it’s doing, which it apparently still doesn’t. I present you with the explosion itself…

…which has been compiled in this video from multiple angles, including slow motion at one point, and just keeps getting funnier with each new change of camera position as it repeats. It must be said, the explosion is pretty great; if only they’d been testing to see just how well the thing could blow up before launch, then this would’ve been a spectacular success.

Meanwhile, Honda—a company better known for vehicles of other kinds—just successfully tested a reuseable rocket of their own without much fuss. Fairly simple test, obviously, I’m guessing rather less complicated than SpaceX’s stuff and it obviously wasn’t going all the way to space, but it actually worked, which is kind of the important thing. And it’s kind of delightful to watch the thing go up and down again from the onboard camera, too.