Starhopper down ...

In a post twelve days ago, I mentioned Elon Musk and SpaceX's new Starhopper rocket. This is a testbed for their planned massive BFS spacecraft.

In it, I wrote:

"Spacecraft are built inside buildings by highly-skilled aerospace engineers. They are not built outside, exposed to the elements - and certainly not by agricultural engineers."

It appears that there are very good reasons why such rockets are built indoors rather than outside. Susceptibility to high winds being one.

Photo from NSF Bocachicagal

Ooops.

All companies make mistakes: Boeing dropped and destroyed part of their new SLS rocket's tank last year, and Lockheed Martin once dropped a satellite during manufacture at a cost of $135 million.

From Wikimedia

But this is a very public mistake. Hopefully SpaceX will learn lessons from this, and their program will not suffer too much delay.