Comment by xethos

8 hours ago

> 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.

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!"

    • 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.

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

>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

    • :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.

      3 replies →

    • 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.

      2 replies →

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