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The View | Narrative spin by SpaceX and the Federal Reserve shows scepticism is the need of the hour
- SpaceX casting its rocket’s failure in a positive light and the US Federal Reserve’s insistence that inflation was transitory are examples of attempts to gloss over bad news
- Meanwhile, the advent of ChatGPT, which convincingly mixes fact and fiction, means caution should be the watchword
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Why you can trust SCMP
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The SpaceX Starship spacecraft is intended to repeat the achievements of the Saturn V rocket that put US astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon in 1969 and then to go onwards to Mars. It is about 30 metres taller than the Statue of Liberty and its 33 rocket engines produce twice the thrust of the Saturn V.
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It lifts a 150-tonne payload into low-Earth orbit, which is more than Saturn V’s capacity, on two rather than three rocket stages. It is an awesome feat of modern engineering.
The latest suborbital flight plan was for a 90-minute flight with splashdown in the Pacific. That was the plan, at least. Five of its engines broke down, which caused the detachment of the first stage to fail. Seconds later, SpaceX officials decided to destroy the whole assembly.
The globally televised launch was accompanied by the kind of jokey commentary expected at a football match, not the serious, breathless voice-overs that followed the moon missions. SpaceX’s rocket failed to reach the targeted altitude, but the company hit planetary levels of scripted narrative.
While the whole spacecraft disappeared in a cloud of smoke, flame and pollutants, SpaceX tried to cast the mission as a success, as it allowed it to collect launch data. It even has new vocabulary to describe the controlled destruction of its spacecraft: “rapid unscheduled disassembly”.
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SpaceX Starship, world’s largest rocket, explodes minutes after lift-off on first test flight
SpaceX Starship, world’s largest rocket, explodes minutes after lift-off on first test flight
Unlike the launch of Starship, the company narrative was an enormous success – a wide array of media outlets reported the positive spin almost verbatim. Every space programme has its share of failures, but tests tend to seek to succeed rather than be designed to fail, as Space X tried to pitch to us.
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