They had another nozzle failure during a test fire in 2019. Root cause ended up being the ground test setup causing a failure mode that wouldn’t (couldn’t) happen in flight. Maybe they made a similar error with this rocket.
Normally when someone reports that they saw a fireball and heard it those claims arent correlated because the observed fireballs are so high that sound wouldn’t reach the observers ears. In this case though it appears to be really low, and the observers may have heard a sonic boom.
It’s not just Musk. The official budget request from the White House proposed phasing out the SLS:
$2.6B of this funding is earmarked for the Lunar Gateway space station. Which is completely unnecessary for moon missions and probably could never be built for that price in the first place. (Each SLS launch costs more than $2B on its own so how do they plan to get it up there?)
But Congressmembers with big aerospace contractors in their districts have their own logic, I suppose.
Around a dozen fireballs per day (night) is typical.
Some things that affect reporting are time of day, whether the fireball crosses a heavily populated area, and whether people are out and about at the time.
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Ars Technica – 2 Jul 25
It poses no threat to Earth and, unfortunately, it appears that our planet will be on the opposite side of the Sun when the object makes its closest approach.
Seems we should still be able to get some pretty damn good data on this one!