If you follow the news, you can’t have missed the headline coming from SpaceX: ”During Starship’s ascent burn, the vehicle experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly and contact was lost”. This is another way of saying that Elon Musk’s latest spaceship has blown up, for the second time in a row, and on its way out it has managed to disrupt dozens of commercial flights with falling debris.
This reminds me of my years of working in research in South Africa. At the end of every month, we had to summarise our work from the past few weeks. This had two purposes. It informed the people working in the production line if research has come up with any possible improvement for their workflow, saving them time or boosting productivity. Secondly, this was to reassure the shareholders that their money was well invested in our research department.
As the name suggests, these “Progress Reports” were expected to end on a positive note. As everybody who has ever worked in research knows, progress is generally patchy and hazy, assuming that there has been any progress at all. If you worked on a couple of projects at the same time, then there was a chance that you had something positive to report on. More often than not, especially if you only had one single project to work on, there was no progress at all, just setbacks, delays, complications, or outright failures. That was ok for a month or two, but became nerve-wracking if you couldn’t show anything positive for months on end.
That’s when the word ‘disimprovement’ was born. I came up with this term one day, hoping that the positive sentiment attached to the last three syllables would overwhelm the negative pull of the first syllable. I used it in the sentence “The results of the latest test series showed a slight disimprovement”. I think I got away with it, there was no inquiry from the readership for further clarification, only the editor of our Progress Reports hesitantly questioned if this word was part of the English language.
Back to our exploding rocket. The word ‘disassembly’ doesn’t sound that bad. It describes a useful process, when used in the right context. As to ‘unscheduled’, well, good things can happen, even if they are not planned. And who would object to ‘rapid’?
SpaceX Exploding – Big Sampson Kay, Bahamas, 7 March 2025 (reuters.com)