The trees are budding, flowers are emerging – including a fine crop of dandelions, suburbia’s most underappreciated blossoms – and the grass is green and long enough to merit a trim. One thing missing from this spring: about 20 degrees Fahrenheit of ambient temperature, sometimes 30. That winter clings so long into what should be spring is, I’ve long felt, worse that the actual pit of winter here in the North.

Happens every year. Then I forget about it as summer really does come.

Over the weekend I watched a clip of the flopnik launch of Starship, a few days after the event, as one does in our time. Flopnik probably isn’t a fair way to describe it, since Vanguard only got a few feet off the pad, but still: “rapid unscheduled disassembly”? That sounds like terminology made up for Space Force. Or it should have been. I only saw the first episode of that series, and found it to be lame. If it had had more jokes like rapid unscheduled disassembly, it might have been a better show.

I’d read about the launch before I watched the video, of course. Learned a few things, too. Apparently the Starship first stage has 33 engines. Sounds like a Soviet approach to clustering engines, and so it is. The N1 rocket first stage (retired in failure in 1972) had 30 engines and, like Starship, was a sumo wrestler among launch vehicles. The N1 didn’t ever propel anything to the Moon, but never mind. The Saturn V? A flawless record.

I’m no rocket engineer and so not up to the task of commenting on Starship‘s technical specs, or even whether the launch was a successful failure, but I will say this: dump that ridiculous name. Until you can build something that proceeds at some sizable fraction of the speed of light, say via sophisticated ion propulsion, and arrives at a nearby star system within a human generation, you haven’t got a starship, Mr. Musk.

Titan is taken, I guess. How about Gargantua? Behemoth? Juggernaut? Granted, all those may convey the rocket’s enormous size, but there’s also an undercurrent of threat in each of those names. Nothing a few million dollars in PR couldn’t try to change. What about Ares? The U.S. decided not to use that name for a rocket, and the thing called Starship is supposed to go to Mars someday, after all.

Something else: what’s all the cheering and applause recorded with the Starship video? A latter addition, or a capture of cheers among spectators? If the latter, were those people really cheering, or hired to cheer? If really cheering, I can understand a cheer at the successful launch, why did they continue to cheer when the rocket had obviously failed?