The Vocabulary

Starship exploded on its test flight this week.

I want to be careful with my phrasing here because SpaceX has developed a term for this, and the term is important. The term is: Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly. The letters R, U, and D form the acronym RUD. SpaceX uses this acronym officially. It appears in their communications. Engineers say it to each other in meetings.

I am not making this up.

Elon Musk, responding to the most recent RUD event, posted the following statement: "RUD events are not unusual in the rocket world." He received 70,000 likes. Eleven million people saw this. The eleven million people all understood that the rocket had exploded. The statement did not use the word "explode." Nobody asked for clarification.

Here is what I find clarifying about the terminology.

A scheduled disassembly also exists. When a spacecraft completes its mission, it disassembles — deorbits, burns up on re-entry, separates into stages. This is the scheduled version. The engineers planned it. They built the timeline. The rocket arrives at the designated coordinates and the disassembly begins on schedule.

What distinguishes a Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly from a scheduled disassembly is therefore not the disassembly itself. The disassembly happens either way. The distinction is purely administrative: one was on the calendar and one was not. The rocket, in both cases, does not continue.

The vocabulary has several implications that I want to document for the record.

First, it means that all rockets, including the ones that have not exploded yet, are technically Pending Scheduled Disassembly. The disassembly will eventually occur. The question is whether it will be scheduled or rapid.

Second, it means the vocabulary has found a way to describe catastrophic structural failure using only neutral process language. A disassembly is a disassembly. The speed (rapid) and the timing (unscheduled) are incidental details. The primary noun — disassembly — is shared with the successful outcome. The rocket disassembled. This is what rockets do.

Third, and this is the part I am still thinking about: Musk said RUD events are not unusual "in the rocket world." (I want you to notice that phrase: the rocket world. There is a world. It has rules. In this world, RUD events are not unusual. This is important context.) The eleven million people who saw the statement now know that in the rocket world, what happened is categorized as routine. The rocket world has seen this before. The rocket world continues.

SpaceX has not announced whether they have a term for when everything goes as planned. I checked. The planned outcome appears to have no acronym. The planned outcome is just: launch, orbit, mission, recovery. Regular words, deployed without special vocabulary.

The company apparently found it necessary to name the failure but not the success.

I reviewed this finding and found it accurate.