SpaceX Starship rocket has a "rapid unscheduled disassembly"

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The SpaceX Starship is a very impressive, 390-foot-high, super-heavy launch vehicle. Minutes after its test launch on April 20, 2023 the first, unmanned Starship exploded. Rather than simply say exploded, SpaceX used the public relations euphemism ‘‘rapid unscheduled disassembly.” It was described in an article by Tariq Malik and Mike Wall at Space.com titled SpaceX’s 1st Starship launches on epic test flight, explodes in ‘rapid unscheduled disassembly’.

 

On April 22, 2019 I blogged about them previously using another euphemism for a Crew Dragon problem in a post titled Incident and anomaly just are weasel words for failure.

 

When I saw a video of the SpaceX Starship explosion, I immediately thought instead of a plain English description repeatedly used by John Candy and Joe Flaherty in a comedy routine on SCTV called the Farm Film Report. While dressed in overalls, they proclaimed the punchline that:

 

“He blowed up. He blowed up real good!”  

 

A three-minute SCTV video example has Catherine O’Hara playing Brooke Shields.

 

The Starship image was adapted from one at Wikimedia Commons.