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Comment by obilgic | Hacker News Reader

HN: "SpaceX Launches and Nearly Lands Starship on Its First Suborbital Flight"

Article: "SpaceX Launches—and Crashes—Its Starship Mars Rocket"

For whatever reason, Wired preferred the clickbait title, but the opening sentence of the article is: "On Wednesday afternoon, SpaceX successfully launched—and nearly landed—a fully-assembled prototype of its next generation Starship rocket on a suborbital flight from its facility in south Texas."

The Wired article was full of misleading information (implying that the rocket failed to reach space, when that was never a mission objective) and outright lies (stating that the Starship is a scaled-up Falcon 9, the name of the Starship+SuperHeavy combo, the number of engines that the system will have, etc, etc).

No, it's not click bait if it's what happened. And what happened is that it crashed. :P

It's clickbait because it implies test failure, which isn't true. The test was successful, as the primary objectives were all met.

"Nearly lands" means crash anyway so any implication of the latter is still there.

Fair point. I suppose I find that the positive language is more harmonious with the actual test outcome, which was a success.

Given that it's a rocket, "nearly land" could mean it kept going in some way, towards space or simply not yet touched down.

So when I read the HN title and thought "what do they mean by nearly landed?" I then saw the article and realized "oh, it crashed".

I'm not sure where the balance should be... "Crash" has a negative connotation, but "nearly lands" is a pretty soft euphemism.

To add to my comment-- I think the CNN headline got it better without the softening euphemism by pointing out it was a success: "A SpaceX Mars rocket prototype just exploded. It was still a success"

I don’t think it exploded. It broke up by hitting the ground (not by exploding) which caused fuel and oxygen to leak out, which then ignited in a large fireball. But maybe this is splitting hairs. It sure looked like an explosion.

oxygen to leak out, which then ignited in a large fireball.

That sounds a lot like a thermoberic bomb :)

Landing safely was an unexpected outcome, so it’s remarkable (thus making it into the headline) that it came close to doing so. The right wording is highly context dependent. Here the “nearly landed” phrasing appropriately acknowledges the realistic expectations for the launch by those most in the know, the SpaceX team.

“Crash” would be totally appropriate in a different context with different expectations. But it would make less sense in this case.

Headlines are usually written by an editor, not the writer, and chosen to generate clicks. That’s why there’s often such a contrast between the headline and the article.

A better article: https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/12/starship-rises-high-...

If you want to see an even worse headline along with flat-out incorrect information in the article, try this bit of journalism. https://www.the-sun.com/news/1944062/space-x-mars-starship-e...

Yeah article has a horrible title.

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