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Elon Musk’s Vaunted New Rocketship Exploded Shortly After Takeoff, And People Are Losing It

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Elon Musk has been busy these days, doing what he’s been doing at Twitter and talking about sex with Tucker Carlson. Priorities, man! As all of those things have been happening, Musk has remained CEO of SpaceX, which conducted a Thursday morning unmanned (thank god) rocket launch that swiftly exploded upon liftoff. This is not exactly a vote of confidence for Musk’s oft-articulated ambitions to take mankind to Mars.

The first 25 seconds went well, at least, as tweeted by SpaceX.

However, this soon happened.

Via the Washington Post, the broadcast included SpaceX’s John Insprucker declaring, “Obviously this does not appear to be a normal situation.” Still and as WaPo notes, the fact that this was a “test” means that SpaceX could count “the flight as a success because it would provide the company new information about how the vehicle performs in real life that will help them on future flights.” In other words, it was a failure but not a technical failure, even though the failure was of a technical nature. Clear as mud?

On Twitter, SpaceX very interestingly described the situation as “a rapid unscheduled disassembly.” Awkwardly, the account maintained the utmost positivity, “Congratulations to the entire SpaceX team on an exciting first integrated flight test of Starship!”

Very quickly, “rapid unscheduled disassembly” began to trend on Twitter with people calling it what it was.

Lincoln Project founder George Conway decided to live dangerously by inquiring the same about Twitter, but he wasn’t alone.

Jokes about euphemisms and metaphors rolled forth.

For obvious reasons, Succession‘s Roman Roy is on people’s minds, too.

And a fake Vladmir Putin account has a new catchphrase, it seems. Success.