Elon Musk is doing his very best to rehabilitate his damaged image. DOGE and all that government twaddle is behind him, he insists. He's going to be working closely at his businesses again, instead of chainsawing federal agencies and getting screamed at by Trump cabinet members. He's done with politics — or spending loads of money on it, anyway. There's robotaxis to roll out and Mars-settlement-shaped bridges to sell.

But if this is his comeback tour, it's started in pretty much the worst way possible.

On Tuesday, Musk was nowhere to be seen at a highly anticipated talk he was supposed to give about SpaceX's plans for colonizing the Red Planet, Gizmodo reports, leaving legions of his fans and spaceflight nerds — not to mention the thousands of SpaceX employees gathered at the company's Starbase headquarters in Texas for the occasion — hanging. 

No explanation was given (though he did fire off some tweets in the interim, albeit at nowhere near his typical spambot levels of frequency). But his truancy might have something to do with his Starship megarocket — an indispensable part of Musk's grand vision of "making life multiplanetary" and spreading his seed across the cosmos — exploding for the umpteenth time during its latest flight test that same day.

Musk's pontification sesh was originally scheduled for 1 PM EST. Then it was pushed back to 1:10 PM, and then to 1:15, and finally, 9 PM, according to Gizmodo, with that last time block coming in after Starship's flight test, which was slated for 7:30 PM that evening. 

When Musk announced that his speech was postponed until after the Starship test, noted science communicator Scott Manley asked in the replies, perhaps presciently: "Is this going to have contingency elements that depend on the outcome of the flight?"

Looks like the answer to that was, "no."

To be fair to the centibillionaire multi-hyphenate, his plans quite literally blew up — or experienced a "rapid unscheduled disassembly" — in his face. It's understandable why he wouldn't want to wax about his future interplanetary dominion when his rocket that's supposed to make that happen lay in ruins. (Before the launch, Musk boasted that there's was an "80 percent chance" that his engineers had solved key issues related to the spacecraft's heat shield tiles.)

In actuality, the Starship prototype, dubbed Ship 35, spun out of control and broke apart as it made a nasty, uncontrolled reentry into the Earth's atmosphere. Then, in an all too familiar final act, the Starship exploded somewhere over the Indian Ocean, putting it out of its misery. Around 40 minutes earlier, the Starship's Super Heavy booster also blew up before it could complete its landing burn.

"Lot of good data to review," Musk wrote in a tweet made at the near-exact time he was supposed to be giving his talk after the several delays.

A new date for the Mars talk hasn't been announced.

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