SpaceX's Starship Achieves Lift Off But Ultimately Experiences 'Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly' In Mixed Bag Of Test Flight

Getting a rocket off the ground is no small feat, and understandably, the team at Elon Musk's SpaceX cheered as they successfully achieved liftoff with their spacecraft and super heavy rocket (collectively referred to as Starship) earlier this morning.

To the confusion of some onlookers, however, they continued cheering as the rocket spectacularly exploded in the sky over the Gulf of Mexico before reaching space.

The biggest and most powerful rocket ever built, Space X's Starship, launches in Texas before a "rapid unscheduled disassembly" during ascenthttps://t.co/hRvf4jIThd pic.twitter.com/XJ8YCayRF2

— BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) April 20, 2023

In what the SpaceX team called a "Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly" but many others dubbed an "explosion," Starship burst into flames before clearing the Earth's atmosphere.

Still, SpaceX viewed liftoff as the main goal of this test, with whatever followed being data it could analyze for subsequent tests. In a cheeky tweet, the SpaceX Twitter account joked that the "Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly" made today's launch all the more exciting.

While the launch is certainly excellent progress for SpaceX in its quest to ship cargo and humans across planets with a fully reusable transportation system, it seemed difficult for many onlookers to view the exploding rocket as a success.

As expected, jokes about the test soon flooded Twitter and other parts of the internet, with "Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly" becoming a key phrase in memes about the launch.

In other Musk-related news, one could say legacy verified Twitter users may experience "Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly" of their blue ticks today, as Twitter announced that the site would remove the checkmarks. However, the company also announced it would do this on April 1st and it didn't come to pass, suggesting the date may have been a prank. That it's now supposedly doing it on 4/20, perceivably one of Elon Musk's favorite jokes, may be yet another gag on Musk's part.