SpaceX Starship rocket explodes in setback to Elon Musk's Mars mission

Not surprising if it’s true that the new COPV design is the root cause. That’s been a very common source of trouble across the industry.

The Starship/Superheavy development program should probably start settling on designs soon, though. In most of the recent anomolies, troubles came down to new designs. Even if current proven designs are suboptimal, they need to get something reliably flying so they can get the iteration loop running full throttle.

That said the whole program is in uncharted territory so to some extent a lot of failures are to be expected. Not only is it the largest ship+booster combo in history, but the type of engines powering it didn’t exist outside of extremely limited lab settings until just a few years ago, and they’re trying to build it with cheap, common materials and manufacturing methods instead of their expensive specialized counterparts.

Honda: our rockets, like our cars, don't explode.