[GMoromisato]

This is a crushing setback for Blue Origin.

I feel for the engineers. They have been the underdogs for so long, but with the recent successful recovery of the New Glenn booster, it finally seemed like they had some bragging rights. Now they're looking at a year minimum before they get back to a regular launch rhythm.

The question now is: What went wrong? If they're lucky, it's just a stupid mistake. Maybe an incorrect procedure while loading fuel, or maybe a manufacturing error got past QC.

If they are unlucky, the cause will be a mystery, and it will take them months to nail down the root cause.

Early in Falcon 9's history, the Amos 6 satellite was stacked on the rocket during a routine static fire and the whole thing blew up. It happened so fast that there were only a few bits of telemetry between "everything normal" and "no signal". For a brief moment SpaceX suspected sabotage by rival ULA. They even requested access to a ULA building to see if a sniper could have taken a shot at the rocket.

It turned out to be an exotic failure: liquid oxygen had gotten caught inside a buckled liner in the carbon composite pressure vessels. Friction ignited it, and the entire second stage blew up, destroying the rocket.

[MPSimmons]

I worked at SpaceX at the time, and I cannot speak for the company, but I can tell you that approximately nobody inside SpaceX took the idea of a sniper seriously. There was a lot of internet talk about it, and it was one of hundreds of avenues that were explored, and ruled out basically as soon as it was explored.

The very interesting part of the liquid oxygen failure (and this was published in the investigative findings) was that the liquid oxygen that became trapped in the fibers was actually cooled and compressed into solid oxygen - you can read some details here: https://www.americaspace.com/2017/01/02/spacex-closes-amos-6...

[giancarlostoro]

> it was one of hundreds of avenues that were explored, and ruled out basically as soon as it was explored.

Sounds like me during a troubleshooting call trying to think of the wildest crap possible based on current available information, even if I sound crazy, sometimes my crazy question hits the nail. Never shun someone for trying to think of any crazy thing, sometimes they hit the nail on the head.

[scarab92]

Very rarely is it appropriate to brainstorm widely.

You want to start with a high level of discernment, focusing on the most plausible theories first, then broadening only if necessary.

If someone started out with crazy low-discernment ideas, I’d probably ask them to leave to stop distracting everyone else.

[tremon]

You really do want breadth-first exploration, because once a group has identified and explored a few scenarios of high likelihood, the brain is already biased towards those events and more exotic scenarios are less likely to be imagined.

Only after that first exploration should you narrow it down according to likelihood. Then, if those likely scenarios appear to be dead ends, you can circle back to the earlier less likely scenarios. But trying to come up with less likely scenarios after your brain has already explored a different scenario in-depth takes a lot more effort.

> If someone started out with crazy low-discernment ideas, I’d probably ask them to leave to stop distracting everyone else.

Then you'd be doing it wrong. Valuing an idea (i.e. rating it in terms of relevance, likelihood, discernment, whatever you want to call it) is not part of the brainstorm, it's part of the post-brainstorm evaluation. Creativity and logic exercise the brain differently, trying to do both at the same time does not give the best results.

[scarab92]

Not convinced.

Creativity is much easier than reasoning and discernment.

Rarely do I need people to be more creative when problem solving, what I need is better judgement.

[smallmancontrov]

Sure, but give a group too long a leash and they will overindex on a tarpit idea. The reason why conspiracy theories are notorious is not because conspiracies don't exist, it's because they are non-falsifiable, fun to speculate about, and easy to understand so everyone can participate. Viral, in other words. Good leaders should steer away from tarpits (and privately ensure that they were scouted, just in case).

[giancarlostoro]

Of course, and I hold back the wilder theories ;) I usually let it rummage through my brain a bit first. I have a "hint" of ADD so my brain can jump all over, but I can get hyper focused on an outage, especially when trying to figure it out involves a bit of brain storming sometimes, and following a methodology to look under every rock.

[Jackson__]

No one inside SpaceX, except for Elon Musk himself? https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/05/spacex-pushed-sniper-t...

[bell-cot]

From that article -

> The “sniper” theory

> The lack of a concrete explanation for the failure led SpaceX engineers to pursue hundreds of theories. One was the possibility that an outside “sniper” had shot the rocket. This theory appealed to SpaceX founder Elon Musk, who was asleep at his home in California when the rocket exploded. Within hours of hearing about the failure, Musk gravitated toward the simple answer of a projectile being shot through the rocket.

> This is not as crazy as it sounds, and other engineers at SpaceX aside from Musk entertained the possibility, as some circumstantial evidence to support the notion of an outside actor existed.

- which sounds fairly close to "don't get caught dismissing our PHB's current crazy idea".

[ASalazarMX]

There's a lot, A LOT of money in play here. Technical reasons are usually the cause, but I wouldn't completely discard sabotage if there's some way they could get away with it, if only to improve procedures.

[bell-cot]

(Assuming you are referring to last night's incident, not the 2016 one.)

No, I wouldn't completely discard it. Nor would I limit sabotage scenarios to stealthy snipers. It could be anything from a suicidal pyromaniac with a hammer to a hacker messing with engine control software and prediction markets, to a nation-state actor.

[BurningFrog]

Also, if your billion dollar rocket can be destroyed by a $2 bullet, maybe you need to look at hardening your design.

[mapt]

A sufficiently advanced technological field is one where any expert would start laughing at you for suggesting "hardening" against bullets. The denominator for rockets is always mass. Most of the difficulty is derived from not just doing a thing, but doing it in as lightweight a way possible. There are rocket stages that won't even stand up under their own weight, we have to inflate them like balloons just to move them.

[bell-cot]

In simpler terms: A bullet-hardened rocket would be about as usable as a lead balloon.

[verzali]

There are rarely mentioned cases where you do actually want to be able to pierce a rocket with a bullet. Mostly related to recovery (or not...) post-flight.

[angry_octet]

Is Elon inside SpaceX? I don't think he's had any role at the company other than owner.

[panick21_]

Consider reading a book about SpaceX maybe.

[mr_toad]

Someone should invent a drinking game based on how long it takes for someone to drop Elon’s name in a thread about a totally different aerospace company.

[organsnyder]

He runs the largest, most prominent company in the field, so it's not like it's off-topic.

[delichon]

> After ULA won an $11 billion block buy contract from the US Air Force to launch high-value military payloads into the early 2020s, Musk sued in April 2014.

This guy is so visionary that he sued for an event that wouldn't happen for over six years. Having the prescience of Paul Atreides explains a lot of his success.

[teraflop]

You're misreading that sentence. The contract was awarded for launches "into the 2020s". It wasn't awarded in the 2020s.

[xethos]

> They even requested access to a ULA building to see if a sniper could have taken a shot at the rocket.

> It turned out to be an exotic failure: liquid oxygen had gotten caught inside a buckled liner

I gotta say, suspecting "Rival company hired a sniper" before "Dealing with liquid oxygen is very fucking hard and incredibly flammable" feels very Elon

[energy123]

You're assuming "before" when it's probably "investigate 100 possible causes in parallel".

[brookst]

I didn’t see that assumption. And I agree “leap to sabotage” sounds a lot like ~~Galt~~ Elon.

[pwillia7]

Relevant WKUK sketch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpC_hO15IoA

[SoftTalker]

Dealing with liquid oxygen is hard, but we've been dealing with it in rocket engines since the 1940s at least. It's not a mystery, but like anything in aerospace, as the saying goes, it is terribly unforgiving of any carelessness, incapacity or neglect.

[ClarityJones]

We hear about how dealing with liquid oxygen is hard. I don't know that we hear about industrial sabotage.

[christophilus]

It reminds me of my younger self when I encountered inexplicable behavior in my own software, “I think I found a bug in Firefox!” … “Oh, nope. I forgot to add an event handler.”

[glimshe]

The modern version of "It must be a compiler bug!"

[genxy]

Compiler bugs are not as rare as they are quipped to be on forums. I mean, more rare for the quippers due to allocation of time.

[glimshe]

I've actually identified a real compiler bug that led to a compiler fix. But then, a broken clock is right twice a day :).

[bagels]

Using c++ templates wrong in the year 2000 exposed me to real compiler bugs in the Microsoft c++ compiler at the time, the kind that would make the compiler crash.

[consp]

I thought it was cosmic rays which always cause the bitflip when you least expect it.

[admissionsguy]

The modern version is "LLMs produce bad code"

[deltaburnt]

LLMs aren't nearly mature or deterministic enough to earn that distinction. I've had an agent tell me it read a link I gave it, when actually it lied. I don't see how you could possibly compare that to a compiler where thinking "maybe it's a compiler bug" means you've almost certainly missed something.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

The funny thing is that I was so sensitized to this behavior that when I actually found a hardware bug in a chip, it took me forever to convince myself that the problem wasn't actually my code.

Finally contacted the manufacturer's rep, expecting to be called an idiot, only to find out that "yeah, we know about that bug. It's going to be fixed in the next revision."

[eichin]

We formalized that as "if you didn't find a kernel bug yesterday, you didn't find one today either" (while implicitly glaring at the java developer who kept blaming everything but his own code.) The funny thing is that we actually had one guy who found two kernel bugs (spread over a couple of years, but still) while hunting down weird product issues - we didn't think the kernel was perfect, just that "you need to have exhausted the possibilities in your code before considering blaming the kernel" was well supported by evidence...

[shagmin]

Reminds me of something that made me cringe that I heard from an architect at a medium sized IT shop, "even Google couldn't handle our scale".

[infinitewars]

The real concern was Russia, given SpaceX has always been a MIC project, now publicly manifest as "Golden Dome" .. a program which undermines M.A.D. and obviously greatly incentives sabotage. There just happened to be a ULA building nearby that was in range and investigated as a possible vector of attack.

[panick21_]

People need to stop with this SpaceX has always been about golden dome theory. Its just a silly conspiricy theory that boils down to, lots of people have worked in the US space industry for a long time.

[nixass]

> now publicly manifest as "Golden Dome

"Golden" goes perfectly in line with the current president's office decor

[ted_bunny]

"Home Depot presents the Apparently Gilded Dome" didn't have the same ring

[coarise]

>feels very Elon

why

[zamadatix]

The history of rocket accidents involving problems handling liquid oxygen is long and considering a sniper as the reason was considered quite unique perspective for someone to propose.

[smoghat]

Well, because it is very Elon. In Reentry: SpaceX, Elon Musk, and the Reusable Rockets that Launched a Second Space Age, Eric Berger recounts how Elon was the only person on the planet who believed his sniper theory.

[LarsKrimi]

Elon is a true genius, up there with Euler and Feynman. So when things don't go perfectly with his initial idea surely it must be a conspiracy to get him down

[iugtmkbdfil834]

:D I am starting to understand why his stock is as high as it is.

Musk is a competent manager, amazing bser, but he is not a genius.

edit: Competent manager is not a slight. There are very few competent managers these days.

[hackeraccount]

I hear what you're saying but ... clearly SpaceX has made some broad technical decisions - I'm think of using metholox or making starship out of steel or falcon first stage re-usability - that seem to have been the correct choice.

I doubt Musk originated these idea but he was the one who ultimately made the decision on them. There were a lot of other people who had the same choice and either didn't come down that way or took a lot longer to come to the same place.

Like I said, genius? I personally wouldn't use that word. He's not an idiot though. He might be the minimum viable product for technical knowledge combined with a large amount of money but that's still pretty remarkable.

[beAbU]

> making starship out of steel

The whole reason for this was because of SS's supposed strength under the heat of reentry. Yet they now need to cover the whole thing in thermal insulating tiles. So I wonder if a composite Starship would not have been a better decision?

[sumeno]

The people I know who have worked for him would not call him a competent manager

[iugtmkbdfil834]

Hmm, you do have a point. What if I asked you to look at him through the lens of the shareholder?

[shafyy]

Comparing Elon Musk, a rich kid that got lucky by investing his money in to "cool shit" with some of the most significant scientists and mathematicians of humankind is just wrong.

[chriswait]

I think that's the joke

[shafyy]

Ah, didn't get the /s :D

[alterom]

>why

hubris

[skywhopper]

Because it’s both delusional and paranoid.

[xethos]

I'd probably throw "grandiose" in there somewhere as well, but that may just be me

[wahern]

Crushing only because their cadence is so slow compared to SpaceX. Their process seems much closer to the highly risk averse methodology of traditional incumbents than to SpaceX's style. Failure becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Rockets are ridiculously complex. Slow-and-steady wins the race makes sense for many individual components, depending on how well understood the problem domain is, and your ability to rigorously model things. But if you take that approach when testing all the thousands of components together, which is simply just too complex to exhaustively model[1], you'll never get anywhere. You have to be prepared to not only break some eggs in epic fashion, but to break many as quickly as you can, so you can parallelize your problem solving and iterate faster.

[1] At least without a large multiple in time and monetary expenditure that ends up costing more than even the US (government and private capital combined) is prepared to spend.

[lunar_mycroft]

No, this would be crushing regardless. Even if Blue Origin had dozens of rockets ready to go, they can't fly without without the pad, which will take around a year to repair (based on previous examples).

[m4rtink]

This was an issue already in the Soviet times, with a couple cases of early rocket explosions destroying the pad and causing long delays, including one spectacular N1 explosion leveling its pad and needing lengthy expensive rebuild.

As a result they went to extensive lengths to avoid pad damage, including never terminating rocket thrust in the first (IIRC) 60 seconds of flight. Better let the rocket crash into something nearby than to explode at the pad.

[mrandish]

> As a result they went to extensive lengths to avoid pad damage, including never terminating rocket thrust in the first (IIRC) 60 seconds of flight.

I was pondering this very thing. Was there a way to learn the same info as this static fire that didn't risk all the pad infrastructure? I get that the tower, fueling systems, deluge, etc all have to work together in a real launch but given the immense schedule and dollar cost of losing the pad, how much less valid would bifurcated tests be? Like each sub-system is tested in-place on the pad without firing the rocket and then static firing itself is done on a more expendable test pad? Maybe even a test pad that's only designed to only survive long enough to get the necessary data before melting and losing the rocket.

Or alternatively, as you mentioned, when it's time to test full fuel load, skip the "static" part and do everything possible to get the rocket up and away ASAP.

[GMoromisato]

The alternative is you don't find out about a problem until it destroys a customer payload. That's better than losing the launch pad, but it depends on the actual probability of each event happening.

What if a static fire reduces your chance of losing a customer payload from 20% to 0.2%, but increases your chance of losing the pad from 1% to 2%?

And note: If they had skipped a static fire and gone straight for a launch, they would have lost the pad anyway, since the explosion happened at ignition.

[baq]

Yeah exactly. Blowing up the rocket is the easy part. Reliably blowing up rockets on a high cadence is hard.

[servo_sausage]

If one pad is the bottleneck, and the goal is to ramp up to be a spacex competitor, then build more than one...

Falcon has shown the playbook, and the demand for launch... The goal should be 2-4 launch sites in the medium term; with a second site very early to avoid exactly this.

[lunar_mycroft]

Until recently, SpaceX only acquired new pads because they needed a completely new launch site (SLC-4 in Vandenberg) or needed to launch a vehicle that their existing pad(s) didn't support (Falcon Heavy for LC-39A, Starship for Pad A in Boca Chica/Starbase). Currently, Blue Origin's only orbital launch vehicle is New Glenn, and their Vandenberg pad is still under construction.

[mr_toad]

Waiting until you need something and don’t have an easy replacement is how you end up with delays and bottlenecks.

[lunar_mycroft]

Launch pads are not something you just buy on a whim to keep around just in case you need them. They're very expensive pieces of infrastructure that you only acquire when you have an actual, known need. That's how every launch provider that I know of behaves, including SpaceX.

[servo_sausage]

Except that they are a competitor trying to catch up; it's not enough to follow what spacex did. They need to target where spacex will be when their own product is mature.

[pbrum]

I was going to say this too. And since we're at it: does anyone know how many launch pads the Chinese private space companies have, combined?

[bob1029]

> if you take that approach when testing all the thousands of components together, which is simply just too complex to exhaustively model[1], you'll never get anywhere.

This is exactly why ideas like test-driven development don't work well as a general approach.

Most realistic systems exhibit non-linear interactions where correctness is not compositional. Local correctness does not compose upward in any meaningful sense. Top-down design (working backward from the customer) allows for you to perform what is effectively one big global search. Bottom-up design (TDD) requires many local searches that all have to fit together perfectly at the very end. With units & composition, the consequences of component A's interactions with component B may not be considered until nearly the end of the project. If you are testing an integrated vertical, you will discover these interactions much earlier.

[mrsmrtss]

That's not how TDD works. You test the whole chain and all the components with tests and you can move from top to bottom with TDD, it's actually how you should do it.

[SAI_Peregrinus]

There's a disconnect between TDD using all sorts of tests (unit, integration, hardware-in-the-loop, in-field, etc.) and TDD using unit tests only. Unit tests provide the least value/line of test code of all types of tests. They're important, since they can catch bugs earlier than other sorts of tests that can't be caught by a type system, but not sufficient to catch most bugs.

[dboreham]

It is however how most software testing is done.

[junon]

"Most" is a gross exaggeration.

[deepsun]

Not true. In early rocket days, soviets tried to use "move fast and break things" approach. They even put artillery generals in charge, who very much liked the approach.

The problem became apparent with several failed launches of moon lander, when rockets blew up or failed to deploy payload. So engineers spent month of assembling a lander that just got burnt. And when it reached its destination, it failed to perform, because they didn't test it separately extensively.

Then they realized it is faster to spend a lot of time testing each part on the ground instead of launching it all together when any bug would prevent even testing the rest.

[jeffrallen]

Failure is not only an option, but is required. The more smaller failures you have, the more big successes you can have.

[card_zero]

Well, they just had a failure, so that spells great success, right?

I'm unclear on the point of why having a rocket blow up when you're being slow and careful is more of a setback than having one blow up when you aren't.

[MarkusQ]

Information theory. If you are doing lots of small, incremental tests, burning through a lot of hardware doing all sorts of characterization and qualifying tests, learning a little bit from each one, you can make steady progress, finding your mistakes as you go.

If instead you try to work out everything in painstaking detail, build a small number of prototypes that your calculations assure you should work, and one blow sup, you learn that...your calculations are wrong.

Imagine developing software with no CI tests, where you only get to run one full system test every couple of months. Slow and careful means avoiding lots and lots of early learning opportunities.

[pfdietz]

Necessary and sufficient are different concepts.

[j1mc]

ah, yes ... there's no success like failure, and failure's no success at all.

[brookst]

Risk aversion is very risky.

[locknitpicker]

> Crushing only because their cadence is so slow compared to SpaceX. Their process seems much closer to the highly risk averse methodology of traditional incumbents than to SpaceX's style. Failure becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

This is a silly perspective. Some reports suggest SpaceX's 1-year budget is around 20 times the yearly budget of Blue Origin. Of course SpaceX can afford to blow up rocket after rocket. The radical difference is not methodologies, but how much cash is being thrown at the project.

For perspective, apparently the whole lunar lander program ran on a 1-year budget much similar to SpaceX's, and thus 20 times larger than Blue Origin's. Where they also highly risk- averse?

[LunicLynx]

Is this a broken down budget you are talking about?

I don’t know the numbers but that spacex has more money moving around does not seem surprising. Launching 100s of rockets per year is not free?

Also did you do an accumulation over their existence? Blue had two orbital launches so far.

[panick21_]

> Some reports suggest SpaceX's 1-year budget is around 20 times the yearly budget of Blue Origin.

I have been following the Space industry for 1-2 decades and I would love to know what you base this number on.

In terms of what we know, is that we know that at times in the 2010s BlueOrigin had almost the same amount of people while launching much less often, having many many fewer projects (like no human capsule, no Starlink). It is well known that Bezos spend more then 1 billion a year on BlueOrigin, people estimate 2-3 billion $. And that was in a period where their overwhelming spend was on New Glenn.

The idea that SpaceX spent 20x that even on Starship is insane and not credible.

In fact, every piece of evidence shows the exact opposite. SpaceX developed Falcon 9 at a incredibly small budget, like literally vanishingly small compared to what New Glenn in spending. And then SpaceX iterated on the design while generating revenue.

New Glenn cost many, many billions before revenue and has a budget that is not that different from Starship will being more comparable to Falcon Heavy.

We also have other evidence. Lunar lander document from NASA suggested as much. NASA estimate that SpaceX would assume 50% of the cost, Blue bid was much higher and they were less willing to self finance (at least initially). Those numbers suggested that SpaceX and BlueOrigin lander cost were not that different, except of course the SpaceX lander had much higher capability.

And pretty much everything we know about Blue is that they spend a huge amount of money and are nowhere near as thrifty as SpaceX, specially compared to the same stage of development. SpaceX had to do that because they simply didn't have the finances. They couldn't just use the 1-3 billion $ of free money flowing into the company.

I open to being proven wrong here with some actual numbers. But I have been following this space in detail and try to look at the best numbers we know publicly and follow some companies that estimate these things. For example, for early SpaceX NASA did a study on cost and how SpaceX could do it at these costs. So we have some good knowledge on that period. We can also look at when SpaceX raised money and do some estimates of their budget and so on. If there are reliable numbers out-there that exist I don't know about, I would love know what you are talking about.

[steve1977]

I'm not sure if I would call the vanity project of one of the richest people on earth an "underdog".

Btw, "If they're lucky, it's just a stupid mistake" is actually interesting.

If you're at that stage and spending so much money, I would consider making stupid mistakes to be catastrophic.

[imglorp]

BO was founded in 2000 and has about 2 orbital launches with a partly reusable system. They build rockets.

SpaceX was founded in 2002 and has around 660 orbital launches with a fully reusable system. They build rocket factories.

BO is absolutely the underdog, in every way, unless you want to count 38 suborbital joyrides, then they're ahead at 38 to 0.

[perilunar]

None of the SpaceX orbital launches so far have been fully reusable. The second stage is not recovered.

[brookst]

Always hope for the stupid mistake. It’s embarrassing but so much better than having the same problem caused by a complex and difficult-to-root-cause issue.

After a long day of working on a car I would much rather have it fail to start because I forgot to connect the battery than fail to start because the starter I replaced had been returned to the store by a previous purchaser, with the wrong part in the box, which was mechanically compatible with the mount but not with the flywheel. (Hypothetically speaking…)

[AdamN]

Sort of - if it's determined that somebody bypassed a safety control they can just make the control firmer and fire that person and move onto other things. If it's some fundamental flaw in the engine design that could set them back months/years.

[Rover222]

Calling Blue Origin a vanity project is so ridiculous.

[g8oz]

They are going to have to do a lot more than they've done to escape that label.

[steve1977]

What would you say is Jeff Bezos' motivation behind it?

[GMoromisato]

Jeff Bezos loves space exploration. He loves O'Neil's vision of orbital colonies, and he firmly believes that moving heavy industry to orbit will leave Earth better off. That's not a vanity project.

The Washington Post, on the other hand, he purchased as a trophy. That's the vanity project.

[panick21_]

He might have bought the Washington Post as a vanity project, but that has not stopped him as using it as a propaganda tool.

> Jeff Bezos loves space exploration. He loves O'Neil's vision of orbital colonies, and he firmly believes that moving heavy industry to orbit will leave Earth better off. That's not a vanity project.

If that was his strategy he would have been much better of in actually investing his money in, actual space stations. There is a clear aspect of dick measuring with Musk. Like Blue literally threw out a lot of their plans because SpaceX was moving ahead of them so fast.

But instead of using SpaceX capability, they fight against it, sue SpaceX and do everything to compete with SpaceX.

For example, its well known how much Bezos wants to beat Musk and SpaceX in a major NASA competition. This has been reported on. They regularly change plans and reorient themselves and go 'all in' on some major project. This has been reported on quite a bit. Even when it is not profitable for them.

They have also de-empathized their Space station, partly because NASA is less interested. But if Bezos has 2-3 billion $ per year to burn, that would be his actual focus.

So this whole 'its all about getting to O'Neil vision' faster is really only part of the situation and do not really explain much of BlueOrigin strategy as company.

Maybe in the early days when Blue was basically a think-tank, this was true, but its not any longer.

[j1mc]

I disagree. The poet Gary Snyder thought space travel was unimaginative - that living life as things are on earth was more interesting and challenging. Owning the Washington Post gives him control over a high visibility U.S. news operation. Nothing vanity about that.

[NetMageSCW]

Apparently Gary Snyder was an idiot.

[Rover222]

Lots of Americans are only capable of this logic for now: billionaire bad

[steve1977]

It's more like pretending to care about earth but living a lifestyle with private jets and yachts: hypocrisy

[Rover222]

Oh you know, probably his clearly stated intentions of driving industry off-earth and into orbit.

Is SpaceX also a vanity project? No, Musk actually wants to expand human civilization beyond one planetary sphere.

Just because they're billionaires doesn't mean they're full of shit. In fact, in both of their cases, it means they're extremely driven by... real ambitions.

So obvious.

[steve1977]

> Musk actually wants to expand human civilization beyond one planetary sphere.

Does he want to expand human civilization for the benefit of human civilization or does he want to be the man who made that expansion possible?

I can absolutely see real ambitions behind them, I just think these ambitions are driven by vanity (and other "vices")

[LooseMarmoset]

Why can't it be both?

[Sparyjerry]

There is clear evidence Musk's original goal with SpaceX was just to encourage more investment into NASA. Remember it was started before Tesla existed and before Musk was a billionaire.

[aubanel]

"United Launch Alliance (ULA) is an American launch service provider formed in December 2006 as a joint venture between Lockheed Martin Space and Boeing Defense, Space & Security."

for those who wondered like me!

[chasd00]

> Maybe an incorrect procedure while loading fuel, or maybe a manufacturing error got past QC.

The water was on when it exploded so it had to be an event very close to ignition. Before the big explosion there was a large intense fire at the bottom but the upper stage exploded before the fire had heated that part of the rocket. Will be interesting to read about what caused it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaR6yEE-Myo&t=128s

[domlebo70]

How does one even go about finding a root cause so exotic?

[elzbardico]

I'd bet lots of telemetry, comprehensive design and change documentation, along with engineers tacit knowledge.

Something like:

telemetry shows dramatic drop of temperature on this, that given the location of the sensor could only be caused by a specific LOX line leak, and vibration sensors show data compatible with friction as the ignition event and not a short circuit because the relevant telemetry doesn't show any electrical abnormality, so, by exclusion, given no other anomalies, give that computer simulations show it is a feasible scenario, followed by lab work with a physical model, this must be the cause of the accident.

[chasd00]

Engineering cameras all over the bottom of the pad will probably be what they use. I'm sure they have high speed cameras looking directly up at the bottom of the engines like SpaceX has. They'll watch frame by frame and then confirm with sensor data or the other way around. Maybe a manufacturing defect caused a turbopump housing to rupture? The energy densities are so crazy in rocket engines that would probably be like 3 sticks of TNT going off. The propulsion engineers are intimately familiar with the engines they probably already have a good idea.

[domlebo70]

Yeah, but at the end of the day you can't be sure right? That doubt would eat away at me

[sephamorr]

The doubt is supposed to stay with you! You need to make sure there aren't other causes or contributing factors hiding behind 'the obvious'. There have been notorious cases in spaceflight where the issue was 'identified' and 'fixed', only for the same thing issue to happen in the next mission.

[mr_toad]

> There have been notorious cases in spaceflight where the issue was 'identified' and 'fixed', only for the same thing issue to happen

In software development this is your average weekday.

[SkyBelow]

Nothing of the level of rocket failure, but I've tracked down issues where you are never sure of the cause. You keep the doubt and let it drive you. You aren't as much sure of a theory, as you have the theory you most want to disprove and keep failing to do so. The more you fail to disprove a given theory while other people with their own personal 'targets' do end up disproving them, the more you can report that the theory is the reasonable conclusion. But you never given up the idea of looking to disprove it. Eventually others join you and work to disprove your theory. As the group continues to fail to disprove it, it becomes the officially stated cause unless someone can provide evidence otherwise.

Sometimes I'll have one that I'm stuck on for a month before finally disproving it, and it is an interesting feeling. There is some level of happiness I succeeded at my goal, but it is very bittersweet because it normally was my last working theory and now I'm simply lost until I can formulate a new one. Sometimes disappointment in myself that I might've missed some easy way to disprove it for so long, but other times the way to disprove it was sufficiently hard enough that I just accept it is what it is.

[hackeraccount]

Nah, there'll be a lot of people who think they know what happened and there'll be one person someone at BO who really knows what happened they just don't know they know it yet. In the course of the analysis that person will hear a couple of known facts and there will be feeling in the pit of your stomach when all doubt goes away. Worst case scenario is that it's something they signed off on.

[Rebelgecko]

>It happened so fast that there were only a few bits of telemetry between "everything normal" and "no signal".

SpaceX also had an architecture that added a lot of latency to their telemetry transmission (IIRC basically Ethernet bufferbloat)

[GMoromisato]

This is a good article about Amos-6: https://www.americaspace.com/2017/01/02/spacex-closes-amos-6...

"Investigators scoured more than 3,000 channels of video and telemetry data covering a very brief timeline of events – there were just 93 milliseconds from the first sign of anomalous data to the loss of the second stage, followed by loss of the vehicle."

I haven't seen anything about latency--are you sure that's a problem in the telemetry stack?

[Rebelgecko]

It featured heavily in the CRS-7 anomaly investigation (https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/public_summa...).

> SpaceX’s new implementation (for Falcon 9 “Full Thrust” flights) of non- deterministic network packets in their flight telemetry increases latency, directly resulting in substantial portions of the anomaly data being lost due to network buffering in the Stage 2 flight computer.

However it looks that finding might've actually been corrected in the months before Amos-6, so moot point!

[hulitu]

> This is a crushing setback for Blue Origin.

For SpaceX it would have been a success. /s

[GMoromisato]

The difference is the 'U' in Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly. Blue Origin just had an "unscheduled" disassembly, whereas the latest Starship explosion in the Indian Ocean was "scheduled"--it was meant to happen that way and no one was surprised.