Economy
SpaceX launches another Starship rocket but it tumbles out of control
After back-to-back explosions, SpaceX launched its mega rocket Starship again on Tuesday evening, but fell short of achieving some of its most important testing goals when the spacecraft tumbled out of control and broke apart, adding fresh engineering hurdles to CEO Elon Musk’s increasingly turbulent Mars rocket program.
The 403-foot (123-meter) rocket, the core of Musk’s goal of sending humans to Mars, blasted off on its ninth demo from Starbase, SpaceX’s launch site at the southern tip of Texas, which residents voted this month to organize as an official city.
Musk’s SpaceX hoped to release a series of mock satellites following liftoff, but that got nixed because the door failed to open all the way.
The spacecraft flew beyond the point of two previous explosive attempts earlier this year that sent debris streaking over Caribbean islands and forced dozens of airliners to divert course, before it began spinning as it skimmed space toward an uncontrolled landing in the Indian Ocean.
SpaceX later confirmed that the spacecraft experienced “a rapid unscheduled disassembly,” or burst apart. “Teams will continue to review data and work toward our next flight test,” the company said in an online statement.
Musk noted in a post on the social media platform X that it was a “big improvement” from the two previous demos, which ended in flaming debris over the Atlantic. Despite the latest setback, he promised a faster launch pace moving forward, with a Starship soaring every three to four weeks for the next three flights.
It was the first time one of Musk’s Starships – intended for moon and Mars travel – flew with a recycled booster. There were no plans to catch the booster with giant chopsticks back at the launch pad, with the company instead pushing it to its limits. Contact with the booster was lost at one point, and it slammed into the Gulf of Mexico in pieces as the spacecraft continued toward the Indian Ocean.
Then the spacecraft went out of control, apparently due to fuel leaks.
“Not looking great with a lot of our on-orbit objectives for today,” said SpaceX flight commentator Dan Huot. The company had been looking to test the spacecraft’s heat shield during a controlled reentry.
Communication ceased before the spacecraft came down, and SpaceX ended its webcast soon afterward.
The previous two Starships never made it past the Caribbean. The demos earlier this year ended just minutes after liftoff, raining wreckage into the ocean. No injuries or serious damage were reported, although airline travel was disrupted.
Risk-tolerant
Besides taking corrective action and making upgrades, SpaceX modified the latest spacecraft’s thermal tiles and installed special catch fittings. This one was meant to sink in the Indian Ocean, but the company wanted to test the add-ons for capturing future versions back at the pad, just like the boosters.
The recent setbacks indicate SpaceX is struggling to overcome a complicated chapter of Starship’s multibillion-dollar development. But the company’s engineering culture, widely considered more risk-tolerant than many of the aerospace industry’s more established players, is built on a flight-testing strategy that pushes spacecraft to the point of failure, then fine-tunes improvements through frequent repetition.
Starship’s planned trajectory for Tuesday included a nearly full orbit around Earth for a controlled splashdown in the Indian Ocean to test new designs of its heat shield tiles and revised flaps for steering its blazing reentry and descent through Earth’s atmosphere.
But its early demise, appearing as a fireball streaking eastward through the night sky over southern Africa, puts another pause in Musk’s speedy development goals for a rocket bound to play a central role in the U.S. space program.
NASA needs SpaceX to make major strides over the next year with Starship – the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built – in order to land astronauts back on the moon. Next year’s moonshot with four astronauts will fly around the moon, but will not land. That will happen in 2027 at the earliest and require a Starship to get two astronauts from lunar orbit to the surface and back off again.
Mishap probe
Federal regulators had granted SpaceX a license for Starship’s latest flight attempt four days ago, capping a mishap investigation that had grounded Starship for nearly two months.
The last two test flights – in January and March – were cut short moments after liftoff as the vehicles blew to pieces on ascent, raining debris over parts of the Caribbean and disrupting scores of commercial airline flights in the region.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) expanded debris hazard zones around the ascent path for Tuesday’s launch and pushed the liftoff outside peak air travel times.
The previous back-to-back failures occurred in early test-flight phases that SpaceX had easily achieved before, in a striking setback to a program that Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur who founded the rocket company in 2002, had sought to accelerate this year.
Musk, the world’s wealthiest individual and a key supporter of U.S. President Donald Trump, was especially eager for success after vowing in recent days to refocus his attention on his various business ventures, including SpaceX, following a tumultuous foray into national politics and his attempts at cutting government bureaucracy.
Closer to home, Musk also sees Starship as eventually replacing the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket as the workhorse in the company’s commercial launch business, which already lofts most of the world’s satellites and other payloads to low-Earth orbit.
U.S. President Donald Trump said Tuesday he would “shortly” name his pick for an open seat on the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors and possibly announce his nominee for Fed chair as well, while ruling out Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who wants to remain in his current role.
Trump called it a “pleasant surprise” that Fed Governor Adriana Kugler had decided to leave her seat now instead of when her term ends in January, according to his interview with CNBC.
That move appears to have accelerated Trump’s decision on who to appoint to an open seat on the Fed board, with possible plans to promote that person to the top policymaking role when Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s term ends in May.
“It’ll be one of four people,” Trump said, adding that he considered both current economic adviser Kevin Hassett and former Fed Governor Kevin Warsh as “very good” possibilities. He did not name the other two, but is reportedly considering current Governor Christopher Waller, who has advocated rate cuts but not at the pace or extent Trump wants.
“There are numerous people that are qualified,” Trump said. “I am going to be announcing that very shortly,” the president said of naming a replacement for Kugler.
“A lot of people say, when you do that, why don’t you just pick the person who is going to head up the Fed? That’s a possibility too,” Trump said.
Trump has been critical of Powell for not cutting interest rates, even as Fed policymakers balance evidence of both a slowing economy and a weakening job market against the fact that inflation remains well above the central bank’s 2% target and is expected to move higher.
Whoever Trump names to Kugler’s seat will need to be confirmed by the Senate, and it would be for a shortened term of only a few months, and require another Senate vote for a full 14-year term early next year.
The nomination for chair of the Fed board would require a separate nomination and Senate confirmation process.
U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday said he would increase the tariff charged on imports from India “very substantially” over the next 24 hours, given the country’s continued purchases of Russian oil.
The threat comes nearly a week after Trump announced 25% tariffs on Indian imports, and U.S. officials have cited a range of geopolitical issues standing in the way of a U.S.-India trade accord.
Trade rift deepened as Trump also threatened unspecified penalties over India’s oil purchases from Russia.
“India has not been a good trading partner, because they do a lot of business with us, but we don’t do business with them,” the president said on Tuesday.
“So we settled on 25% but I think I’m going to raise that very substantially over the next 24 hours, because they’re buying Russian oil,” he told CNBC in a televised interview.
Earlier on Tuesday, India’s ruling party and main opposition condemned Trump’s threat, in a show of political unity.
Manish Tewari, a member of Parliament and leader of the opposition Congress, said Trump’s “disparaging remarks hurt the dignity and self-respect of Indians.”
“The time has come to call out this constant bullying and hectoring,” he added.
BJP Vice President Baijayant Jay Panda quoted Henry Kissinger – the most powerful U.S. diplomat of the Cold War era – in a post on social media platform X: “To be an enemy of America can be dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal.”
India’s Foreign Ministry said the country was being unfairly singled out over its purchases of Russian oil, and highlighted continued trade between Moscow and both the U.S. and the European Union, despite the war in Ukraine.
“It is revealing that the very nations criticizing India are themselves indulging in trade with Russia,” it said in a statement issued late on Monday.
“It is unjustified to single out India,” the ministry said.
It said the EU conducted 67.5 billion euros ($78.02 billion) in trade with Russia in 2024, including record imports of liquefied natural gas (LNG) reaching 16.5 million metric tons.
The United States, the statement said, continues to import Russian uranium hexafluoride for use in its nuclear power industry, palladium, fertilizers and chemicals. It did not give a source for the export information.
Both the United States and the EU have sharply scaled back their trade ties with Russia since it launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
In 2021, Russia was the EU’s fifth-largest trading partner, with goods exchange worth 258 billion euros, according to the EU executive European Commission.
Sudden rift
India is the biggest buyer of seaborne crude from Russia, importing about 1.75 million barrels per day of Russian oil from January to June this year, up 1% from a year ago, according to data provided to Reuters by trade sources.
It has faced pressure from the West to distance itself from Moscow since Russia invaded Ukraine. New Delhi has resisted, citing its longstanding ties with Russia and economic needs.
India’s National Security Adviser Ajit Doval is likely to travel to Russia this week on a scheduled visit, two government sources said. Foreign Minister S Jaishankar is expected to visit in the coming weeks.
The sudden rift between India and the U.S. has been deepening since July 31, when Trump announced the 25% tariff on goods being shipped to the U.S. and for the first time threatened unspecified penalties for buying Russian oil.
Trump has said that from Friday, he will impose new sanctions on Russia as well as on countries that buy its energy exports, unless Moscow takes steps to end the war with Ukraine.
The trade tensions have caused concern about the potential impact on India’s economy.
The equity benchmark BSE Sensex closed down 0.38%, while the rupee dropped 0.17% versus the dollar.
Norway has ordered a review of its sovereign wealth fund’s holdings to ensure that Israeli companies linked to the occupation of the West Bank or the war in Gaza are excluded from its investment portfolio, its government said on Tuesday.
The review followed a report by the Aftenposten daily that said the $1.9 trillion fund had built a stake in 2023-24 in an Israeli jet engine group that provides services to Israel’s armed forces, including the maintenance of fighter jets.
The fund’s investment in the Bet Shemesh Engines Ltd (BSEL) group is worrying, Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Stoere told public broadcaster NRK. “We must get clarification on this because reading about it makes me uneasy,” Stoere said.
Norges Bank Investment Management (NBIM), which manages the fund, took a 1.3% stake in BSEL in 2023 and raised this to 2.09% by the end of 2024, holding shares worth $15.2 million, the latest available NBIM records show.
In light of Aftenposten’s story and the security situation in Gaza and the West Bank, the central bank will now conduct a review of NBIM’s Israeli holdings, Finance Minister Jens Stoltenberg said on Tuesday.
“In light of this (Gaza) case and the deteriorating situation in Gaza and the West Bank, I will today ask Norges Bank (Norway’s central bank) and the Ethics Council to conduct a renewed review of the fund’s investments in Israeli companies and the bank’s work on responsible management,” Stoltenberg said.
He stressed that the purpose of the review is to ensure that the fund is not financially linked to companies that may be complicit in violations of international law, NRK reported.
“The aim is to ensure that the fund is not invested in companies that contribute to the illegal occupation of the West Bank and the war in Gaza, that is contrary to international law,” Stoltenberg added.
Nicolai Tangen, CEO of NBIM, confirmed on Tuesday that the fund had purchased a stake in BSEL in 2023 and that it had increased its holdings after the Israeli offensive in Gaza began.
Tangen told NRK that BSEL had not appeared on any lists of recommended exclusions, such as those by the United Nations or the fund’s own ethics council.
Stoltenberg said he still had confidence in Tangen, following calls that the fund head should resign.
Norway’s parliament in June rejected a proposal for the sovereign wealth fund to divest from all companies with activities in the occupied Palestinian territories.
The fund, which owns stakes in 8,700 companies worldwide, held shares in 65 Israeli companies at the end of 2024, valued at $1.95 billion, its records show.
Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, the world’s largest, has sold its stakes in an Israeli energy company and a telecoms group in the last year, and its ethics council has said it is reviewing whether to recommend divesting holdings in five banks.
The Israeli army has pursued a brutal offensive on Gaza since Oct. 7, 2023, killing nearly 61,000 Palestinians, almost half of them women and children. The military campaign has devastated the enclave and brought it to the verge of famine.
Last November, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.
Israel also faces a genocide case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for its war on the enclave.
Syrian Economy and Industry Minister Nidal al-Shaar said Tuesday that Türkiye and Syria are “bound by destiny” and share “a common future” during a meeting.
The Türkiye-Syria roundtable meeting in Ankara was also attended by Turkish Trade Minister Ömer Bolat and Rifat Hisarcıklıoğlu, the president of Türkiye’s Union of Chambers and Commodity Exchanges.
Al-Shaar said Türkiye became “one of the largest economies worldwide in two decades,” and the relations between Ankara and Damascus will continue based on “mutual respect and sincerity.”
The minister said that “no country other than Türkiye and Syria” has done as much for each other, emphasizing that the continued partnership “has to be established in every area,” extending it to cultural, social, economic, industrial, and production areas.
“The experience Türkiye has is one that we can call a miracle,” he said. “That is not easy.”
Al-Shaar said the partnership will start with small and medium-sized enterprises, and then it will move on to larger projects. “We placed trust in the Turkish economy and the Turkish business community, especially in the field of investments,” he noted.
He mentioned that Türkiye will establish production plants in Syria and export industrial goods, while the investments from Türkiye will drive more production.
Al-Shaar highlighted that the 15-year break in relations between Türkiye and Syria during the civil war will resume with the collective effort of rebuilding the country. “The Türkiye-Syria partnership is certain, and it is guided by destiny: this is why we will be together,” he said.
Ankara, which supported opposition forces in Syria throughout the 13-year civil war that ended in December with the ousting of longtime dictator Bashar Assad, has now become one of the new government’s main foreign allies while positioning itself to be a major player in the country’s reconstruction.
Bolat said Tuesday that Turkish banks are preparing to launch operations in Syria in the near future.
Argentina’s libertarian President Javier Milei vetoed on Monday an attempt to hike spending on pensions in the country and a law expanding protections for people with disabilities, saying the legislation would have undermined his flagship pledge to eliminate the nation’s chronic fiscal deficit before October’s midterm elections.
In publishing the veto decisions, Milei’s administration said that Congress last month passed the spending bills – meant to more fully compensate retirees for inflation and offer more financial benefits for people with disabilities – “without determining the source of the funds.”
It said the bills “contradicted (Milei’s) popular mandate” to bring down inflation.
Since coming to power in late 2023, Milei has vetoed all efforts to boost public spending, often wielding the slogan “there is no money” against people’s demands that he restore subsidies. The government projects that the additional expenditures, including a 7.2% pension increase, will amount to about 0.9% of gross domestic product (GDP) this year and 1.68% next year.
“This president prefers to tell an uncomfortable truth rather than repeat comfortable lies: There is no money,” the government said. Spinning off the slogan of his ally, U.S. President Donald Trump, it added: “The only way to make Argentina great again is with effort and honesty, not the same old recipes.”
Last year, Milei racked up Argentina’s first annual fiscal surplus in 14 years by making painful cuts to social spending and public works. The austerity measures helped drive down Argentina’s monthly inflation rate to below 2% in June for the first time in five years, compared to more than 25% when Milei entered office in December 2023.
But the fiscal shock program has also deepened economic misery for many Argentines: Unemployment has climbed, wages adjusted for inflation have declined, and prices are still up 40% year-on-year.
Congress can still overturn these vetoes with a two-thirds majority in both chambers, a challenge for Milei’s libertarian party, which holds only a small minority of seats.
Milei, whose relationship with lawmakers has been tense ever since he took office, last year managed to win enough votes from his party’s closest ally, the conservative PRO bloc, to prevent the pension increases.
Milei is looking to Argentina’s crucial midterm elections in October to boost his party’s representation as he seeks to continue his fiscal balance drive and draw more foreign investment.
The elections are widely seen as a referendum on his two years in office.
Retirees have been at the forefront of protests against Milei’s government. Every Wednesday now for months, dozens of older Argentines struggling to scrape by on pensions of just $400 a month have faced off against security forces armed with tear gas and water cannons.
When the coronavirus surged during President Donald Trump’s first term, he sought to downplay the outbreak by urging fewer tests. After losing the 2020 election, he claimed – without evidence – that the vote was rigged.
And on Friday, faced with a weak July jobs report, Trump followed a familiar pattern: He dismissed the report as “phony” and fired the official in charge of the data.
Trump has a go-to playbook if the numbers reveal uncomfortable realities, and that’s to discredit or conceal the figures and to attack the messenger – all of which can hurt the president’s efforts to convince the world that America is getting stronger.
“Our democratic system and the strength of our private economy depend on the honest flow of information about our economy, our government and our society,” said Douglas Elmendorf, a Harvard University professor who was formerly director of the Congressional Budget Office. “The Trump administration is trying to suppress honest analysis.”
The president’s strategy carries significant risks for his own administration and a broader economy that depends on politics-free data.
His denouncements threaten to lower trust in government and erode public accountability, and any manipulation of federal data could result in policy choices made on faulty numbers, causing larger problems for both the president and the country.
The White House disputes any claims that Trump wants to hide numbers that undermine his preferred narratives.
It emphasized that Goldman Sachs found that the two-month revisions on the jobs report were the largest since 1968, outside of a recession, and that should be a source of concern regarding the integrity of the data. Trump’s aides say their fundamental focus is ensuring that any data gives an accurate view of reality.
Not first time
Trump has a long history of dismissing data when it reflects poorly on him and extolling or even fabricating more favorable numbers, a pattern that includes his net worth, his family business, election results and government figures:
Judge Arthur Engoron ruled in a lawsuit brought by the state of New York that Trump and his company deceived banks, insurers and others by massively overvaluing his assets and exaggerating his net worth on paperwork used in making deals and securing loans. Trump has claimed that the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections were each rigged. Trump won the 2016 presidential election by clinching the Electoral College, but he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton, a sore spot that led him to falsely claim that millions of immigrants living in the country illegally had cast ballots. He lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden but falsely claimed he had won it, despite multiple lawsuits failing to prove his case. In 2019, as Hurricane Dorian neared the East Coast, Trump warned Alabama that the storm was coming its way. Forecasters pushed back, saying Alabama was not at risk. Trump later displayed a map in the Oval Office that had been altered with a black Sharpie – his signature pen – to include Alabama in the potential path of the storm. Trump’s administration has stopped posting reports on climate change, canceled studies on vaccine access and removed data on gender identity from government sites. As pandemic deaths mounted, Trump suggested that there should be less testing. “When you do testing to that extent, you’re going to find more people,” Trump said at a June 2020 rally in Oklahoma. “You’re going to find more cases. So I said to my people, ‘Slow the testing down, please.'”
While Trump’s actions have drawn outcry from economists, scientists and public interest groups, Elmendorf noted that Trump’s actions regarding economic data could be tempered by Congress, which could put limits on the president by whom he chooses to lead federal agencies, for example.
“Outside observers can only do so much,” Elmendorf said. “The power to push back against the president rests with the Congress. They have not exercised that power, but they could.”
Trump wants ‘own people’ in place
Kevin Hassett, director of the White House National Economic Council, took aim at the size of the downward revisions in the jobs report (a combined 258,000 reduction in May and June) to suggest that the report had credibility issues.
He said Trump is focused on getting dependable numbers, despite the president linking the issue to politics by claiming the revisions were meant to make Republicans look bad.
“The president wants his own people there so that when we see the numbers, they’re more transparent and more reliable,” Hassett said Sunday on NBC News.
Jed Kolko, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics who oversaw the Census Bureau and Bureau of Economic Analysis during the Biden administration, stressed that revisions to the jobs data are standard. That’s because the numbers are published monthly, but not all surveys used are returned quickly enough to be in the initial publishing of the jobs report.
“Revisions solve the tension between timeliness and accuracy,” Kolko said. “We want timely data because policymakers and businesses and investors need to make decisions with the best data that’s available, but we also want accuracy.”
Kolko stressed the importance of ensuring that federal statistics are trustworthy, not just for government policymakers but for the companies trying to gauge the overall direction of the economy when making hiring and investment choices.
“Businesses are less likely to make investments if they can’t trust data about how the economy is doing,” he said.
Not every part of the jobs report was deemed suspect by the Trump administration.
Before Trump ordered the firing of the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner, Erika McEntarfer, the White House rapid response social media account reposted a statement by Vice President JD Vance noting that native-born citizens were getting jobs and immigrants were not, drawing from data in the household tables in the jobs report.
Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer also trumpeted the findings on native-born citizens, noting on Fox Business Network’s “Varney & Co.” that they are accounting “for all of the job growth, and that’s key.”
During his first run for the presidency, Trump criticized the economic data as being fake, only to fully embrace the positive numbers shortly after he first entered the White House in 2017.
Transparency is value
The challenge of reliable data goes beyond economic figures to basic information on climate change and scientific research.
In July, taxpayer-funded reports on the problems climate change is creating for America and its population disappeared from government websites. The White House initially said NASA would post the reports in compliance with a 1990 law, but the agency later said it would not because any legal obligations were already met by having reports submitted to Congress.
The White House maintains that it has operated with complete openness, posting a picture of Trump on Monday on social media with the caption, “The Most Transparent President in History.”
In the picture, Trump had his back to the camera and was covered in shadows, visibly blocking out most of the light in front of him.
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