Just a Scratch

In what is now basically a monthly tradition, SpaceX’s Starship once again went up in a glorious, cinematic explosion Wednesday night in Texas, providing another multimillion-dollar fireworks show for Musk’s legion of Twitter/X followers.

But fear not, because Elon Musk—part CEO, part meme account—reassured everyone with his profound, three-word medical assessment: “Just a scratch.” Yes, because when your $3 billion rocket explodes into a towering inferno, it’s basically the aerospace equivalent of a paper cut.

The SpaceX team calmly assured the public that everything was fine, nobody was hurt, and that the only thing burning was hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars—again. Local residents were asked to avoid the site, presumably to give the PR team enough room to come up with fresh euphemisms for "catastrophic failure" (spoiler alert: they settled on “major anomaly”).

With multiple previous failures already under its belt this year, Starship’s exploding habit is starting to feel less like R&D and more like performance art. But to be fair, Musk did promise one thing early on: “Success is uncertain, but entertainment is guaranteed.” And on that front, he’s absolutely crushing it.

NASA, which is depending on this self-immolating monster to help with its Artemis program, is reportedly developing a backup plan called “maybe we should ask Jeff Bezos.”

As usual, Musk brushed it all off, reminding us that “success is uncertain, but entertainment is guaranteed.” Which might as well be the new official motto of both SpaceX and Musk’s entire personal brand.