{"id":147068,"date":"2025-11-21T21:47:07","date_gmt":"2025-11-21T21:47:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/147068\/"},"modified":"2025-11-21T21:47:07","modified_gmt":"2025-11-21T21:47:07","slug":"while-grok-calls-him-a-genius-elons-new-rocket-explodes-while-just-sitting-there","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/147068\/","title":{"rendered":"While Grok Calls Him a Genius, Elon\u2019s New Rocket Explodes While Just Sitting There"},"content":{"rendered":"

Elon Musk\u2019s AI chatbot Grok experienced its latest meltdown<\/a> this week, telling users that the mercurial CEO is more athletic than basketball superstar LeBron James and rivals Leonardo da Vinci in intelligence.<\/p>\n

But when it comes to launching rockets, the entrepreneur is struggling to live up to Grok\u2019s outrageous flattery. Right on the heels of the glazing, Musk\u2019s space company SpaceX suffered a major setback on Friday morning when a next-generation Starship booster prototype exploded during testing.<\/p>\n

As Ars Technica\u2018s Eric Berger reports<\/a>, the incident occurred at the company\u2019s Massey test site several miles away from its \u201cStarbase\u201d testing facilities in South Texas. A livestream<\/a> shows the booster exploding at around 4:04 am local time.<\/p>\n

In a statement posted to X several hours later<\/a>, SpaceX admitted that \u201cBooster 18 suffered an anomaly during gas system pressure testing that we were conducting in advance of structural proof testing.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNo propellant was on the vehicle, and engines were not yet installed,\u201d the company wrote. \u201cThe teams need time to investigate before we are confident of the cause.\u201d<\/p>\n

While there were fortunately no injuries, the latest explosion is yet another setback for the company that\u2019s now markedly falling behind its enormously ambitious timeline to realize its super-heavy launch system. Starship\u2019s development has already led to over a dozen powerful explosions<\/a>, a controversial iterative design philosophy that has drawn plenty of skepticism.<\/p>\n

The company is still hoping to safely ferry astronauts down to the lunar surface<\/a> as part of NASA\u2019s Artemis 3 mission, a mere two years from now. Before then, SpaceX will have to complete on-orbit refueling tests, the first of which is slated for the latter half of 2026.<\/p>\n

\u201cFrom an outside perspective, before this most recent failure, that timeline already seemed to be fairly optimistic,\u201d Berger wrote for Ars.<\/p>\n

Booster 18 was the first Version 3 Starship designed to test a litany of upgrades and design fixes. Version 2 first launched during SpaceX\u2019s seventh flight test<\/a> in January and was retired after the company\u2019s eleventh flight test<\/a> last month.<\/p>\n

While we have yet to get a better sense of Booster 18\u2019s current stage, onlookers described \u201cvery significant damage<\/a>,\u201d particularly to the rocket\u2019s liquid oxygen tanks.<\/p>\n

Previous test flights have seen the enormous first stage successfully launch and even be caught<\/a> upon landing by a pair of \u201cchopsticks\u201d arms attached to a \u201cMechazilla\u201d launch tower.<\/p>\n

Besides its own extremely aggressive timeline, SpaceX also has growing competition to contend with. Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin recently successfully launched<\/a> its slightly smaller New Glenn heavy-lift rocket for a second time, deploying two cutting-edge NASA spacecraft in the process.<\/p>\n

After the trip to space, the rocket\u2019s first stage neatly touched down on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean, firmly proving that SpaceX isn\u2019t the only company capable of such a feat.<\/p>\n

Worse yet, the Trump administration has indicated<\/a> that it\u2019s looking to have Blue Origin compete for the lucrative Artemis 3 human landing systems contract with its Blue Moon lander after all.<\/p>\n

Last month, NASA\u2019s interim administrator Sean Duffy told Fox News<\/a> last month that SpaceX is \u201cbehind schedule\u201d \u2014 comments that incensed Musk<\/a>.<\/p>\n

More on Starship: SpaceX Releases Renders of the Inside of Its Enormous Lunar Lander<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Elon Musk\u2019s AI chatbot Grok experienced its latest meltdown this week, telling users that the mercurial CEO is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":147069,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[516,98467,901,7911,111,139,69,5146,147,392,1503,98468],"class_list":{"0":"post-147068","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-elon-musk","9":"tag-eric-berger","10":"tag-lebron-james","11":"tag-leonardo-da-vinci","12":"tag-new-zealand","13":"tag-newzealand","14":"tag-nz","15":"tag-rockets","16":"tag-science","17":"tag-space","18":"tag-spacex","19":"tag-testing-facilities"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147068","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=147068"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147068\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/147069"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=147068"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=147068"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=147068"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}