You Can’t Make an Omelette without Exploding Several Billion Dollars’ Worth of Eggs

“After back-to-back explosions, SpaceX launched its mega rocket Starship again on Tuesday evening, but fell short of the main objectives when the spacecraft tumbled out of control and broke apart.” – PBS

We at SpaceX would like to remind the losers who have been gleefully pointing out how often our rockets explode that exploding rockets are a completely normal part of spaceflight.

Look, things explode. It’s just part of nature. Cybertrucks explode, and it’s no big deal. (Really, it’s not a big deal that cybertrucks explode.) So why should we spend so much time harping on how frequently our rockets explode, when we could, instead, focus on how long they haven’t exploded? Many of our rockets that haven’t launched are stored safely, completely unexploded. Yet does anyone congratulate us on the unexploded rockets? Nope.

With every single explosion, we learn and we improve. That’s called science. For example, when one rocket exploded due to a fuel leak, we removed all of the fuel and solved the problem: no more explosions. The rocket also didn’t take off, so we tried replacing the fuel with a much more volatile fuel, but then that rocket exploded. So we learned two lessons—at a cost of merely $6 billion.

We all make mistakes. Even you. You made a mistake by questioning us. Our mistakes happen to spread fiery debris down from the heavens, but that’s just the cost of business. This is really a “no harm, no foul” situation. Sure, there’s a bunch of garbage falling from the sky, but most of it falls in the ocean, and who cares about the ocean? We’re not fish. We’re not whales. We’re not Snorks. We’re people. We live on the land. And sure, the explosions disrupt air travel, but air travel is so easy and unstructured that a little disruption doesn’t hurt it in the least.

We’ve tried to improve our rockets, we really have. Many of our top technicians have been working, day and night, supplying ChatGPT with ever-more-refined queries such as “Could you make the rocket explode less?” and “This is a good start, but can you design a rocket that doesn’t go boom?” and ChatGPT has told us, in no uncertain terms, that it’s impossible. It also gave us several suggestions for “explosive fanfic involving Team Rocket,” which we’ve saved, just in case. (Some of our scientists tried asking Grok the same things, but most of the responses involved tirades against Nelson Mandela.)

Are you guys rocket scientists? No. You’re not. Neither are we. Most of us have degrees in business communication and have been promoted far beyond our abilities due to a complete knowledge vacuum in the upper reaches of management, like a black hole that pulls incompetence up, into darkness. (Black holes are a space thing, which we know a lot about.)

But the beauty of the free market is that we get to try, we get to disrupt, and yes, some of our spacecraft will unintentionally detonate along the way. That’s just how the free market works. “Aren’t you heavily subsidized by the government?” you may ask, and to that I have one simple answer that will shut you up for good—wait, hold on. Oh. Oh no. Damn damn damn.

Okay, I forgot I was supposed to be watching this launch. On the plus side, we’ve achieved our fastest ever launch-to-explosion time (0.01 seconds!), so we’re all going to celebrate by lighting up some cigars and wandering around the fueling area, giving each other high-fives.