Comment by GMoromisato
10 hours ago
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.
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...
No one inside SpaceX, except for Elon Musk himself? https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/05/spacex-pushed-sniper-t...
> 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.
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".
> 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
You're assuming "before" when it's probably "investigate 100 possible causes in parallel".
I didn’t see that assumption. And I agree “leap to sabotage” sounds a lot like ~~Galt~~ Elon.
Relevant WKUK sketch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpC_hO15IoA
We hear about how dealing with liquid oxygen is hard. I don't know that we hear about industrial sabotage.
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.”
The modern version of "It must be a compiler bug!"
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>feels very Elon
why
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.
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.
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
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Because it’s both delusional and paranoid.
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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.
> now publicly manifest as "Golden Dome
"Golden" goes perfectly in line with the current president's office decor
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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.
> 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.
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.
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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).
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.
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Yeah exactly. Blowing up the rocket is the easy part. Reliably blowing up rockets on a high cadence is hard.
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.
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Risk aversion is very risky.
Failure is not only an option, but is required. The more smaller failures you have, the more big successes you can have.
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.
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> 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?
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.
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.
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…)
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.
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.
Calling Blue Origin a vanity project is so ridiculous.
"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!
How does one even go about finding a root cause so exotic?
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.
Yeah, but at the end of the day you can't be sure right? That doubt would eat away at me
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Are there enough open source aero engineering projects to give the current ai approaches a remotely plausible amount of training data?
Imagine is a good word to use. Before offering a solution, understand the problem first - is "debugging speed" a problem that needs solving, in this case?
Much more likely is that it would hallucinate a plausible sounding but incorrect answer and send intermediate and junior engineers on a wild goose chase
if an LLM is capable enough to be used this way it would be used to generate scenarios for the people who would otherwise have to be the ones to generate them. those people would then evaluate the scnearios. those people would then be in a position to decide if the LLM saves them time.
> a plausible sounding but incorrect answer
That is an incorrect but plausible hypothesis. Do you really think that people can't make such mistakes?
If you want to say that people have understanding, then define understanding in an operationalizable way first.
It doesn't mean that I would recommend a general-purpose AI model without additional training to do a fault analysis.
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