Sunday's SpaceX failure

[Anomalocaris]

Oops, guess ya can't win them all.

"The mission itself was shrouded in secrecy even before it failed to enter a stable orbit. The government agency that ordered the spacecraft has not been disclosed."

http://money.cnn.com/2018/01/09/technolo...index.html

Let the conspiracy theories fly. I blame Trump and the Russians.

I think enough has been revealed to strongly suggest it wasn’t the space X carrier rocket, but part of the secret payload responsible for final orbit insertion, that malfunctioned.

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A Tesla Roadster heads off for Mars tomorrow . . .

The space X heavy is the biggest kluge of a rocket since soviet union’s N-1 manned lunar rocket.   The N-1 never failed to fail during all of its launches. The N-1 failed because it had the same attribute as the space X heavy, which is it has an obscene number of individual rocket motors on the first stage. The failure of any of the motors was enough to lead to catastrophic failure.

Also, the breathless US news media claim that space X is the largest rocket other than Saturn V is untrue.  

The N-1 and the Energia, which were successfully launched in 1988, were much larger.