[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