MUSK UNBOWED BY ABJECT FAILURE OF LATEST SPACEX LAUNCH

Elon dicking around in space, obviously.

In a trajectory not unlike Elon Musk's own political career, the latest SpaceX Starship has exploded in a cloud of fiery debris high above the Indian Ocean after a promising start.

As reported by the Guardian:

"The biggest and most powerful launch vehicle ever built lifted off at 6.36pm local time from the company’s facility near a southern Texas village that earlier this month voted to become a city also named Starbase.

The first signs of trouble emerged when the first-stage Super Heavy booster blew up instead of executing its planned splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico.

A live feed then showed the upper-stage spaceship failing to open its doors to deploy a payload of Starlink satellite 'simulators'.

Though the ship flew farther than on its two previous attempts, it sprang leaks and began spinning out of control as it coasted through space on a suborbital path before re-entering the atmosphere out of control and eventually breaking apart."

With Musk facing serious challenges to his other core businesses (Tesla & Twitter), the success of his rockets has never been more important to maintaining his personal brand as some kind of "super science n' business guru" instead of  just a weirdo on ketamine, living off hype and government contracts.

He is also in the process of launching a new "memecoin" and was pinning his hopes on a successful launch creating a positive buzz.

The official SpaceX account on Twitter responded with a worrying degree of levity in an attempt to downplay the enormous failure:

"Starship experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly."

Meanwhile, Musk vowed to keep on keeping on, promising similar flights every three to four weeks. 

Grok, the artificial intelligence feature on Twitter, estimates that the cost of the rocket that exploded was around $120 million. As Musk has an estimated fortune of  $421 billion, it is theoretically possible for him to launch 3,510 similar rockets.