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...
> 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.
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).
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.
No one inside SpaceX, except for Elon Musk himself? https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/05/spacex-pushed-sniper-t...
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".
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.
> 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.
You're misreading that sentence. The contract was awarded for launches "into the 2020s". It wasn't awarded in the 2020s.
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.
He runs the largest, most prominent company in the field, so it's not like it's off-topic.
> 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.
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.
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 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."
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.
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.
I've actually identified a real compiler bug that led to a compiler fix. But then, a broken clock is right twice a day :).
I thought it was cosmic rays which always cause the bitflip when you least expect it.
The modern version is "LLMs produce bad code"
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.
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".
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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.
>why
hubris
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.
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.
The people I know who have worked for him would not call him a competent manager
Hmm, you do have a point. What if I asked you to look at him through the lens of the shareholder?
yet he has a couple of the most valuable companies on the planet
EDS is so weird
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.
I think that's the joke
Ah, didn't get the /s :D
Because it’s both delusional and paranoid.
I'd probably throw "grandiose" in there somewhere as well, but that may just be me
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Go to bed, Elon.
100%
Bandwagon-ers who parrot media/youtube/socialmedia.
Waiting to be told who to hate next.
Yeah they shouldn't have posted that Nazi salute!!!
Irrelevant to his ability to run a company that makes good rockets at an efficient price, so... who cares? This is exactly the point of the person you're replying to.
The ad hominem destroys your ability to recognise how insanely good SpaceX and Elon are at this rocket ship thing.
Actual Nazis made a lot of stuff 75 years ago that you use and take advantage of on a daily basis. Nobody's judging you, dude. Appreciating and recognising a good scientist or businessman doesn't necessitate that you align with them ideologically.
But "running the company" also involved claiming a sniper agent may have been to blame.
I think it's apropos then to consider that this is the same guy who called someone who rescued children stuck in a cave a "pedo". This is a guy who has made some unfortunate public statements.
Or because it was a thing Elon pursued: https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/05/spacex-pushed-sniper-t...
Reading facts about Elon Musk and making reasonable conclusions about him based on those facts is just anti-Elon bias!
The only way to not be biased is to unthinkingly accept everything he says as truth
Seriously considering that a rival hired a sniper to shoot your rocket is stupid.
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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
"Home Depot presents the Apparently Gilded Dome" didn't have the same ring
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.
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.
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.
Waiting until you need something and don’t have an easy replacement is how you end up with delays and bottlenecks.
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.
I don't disagree at all, but I'm quite curious where the cost actually comes from. Even including all the harnessing and other hardware, it doesn't seem like something that should be a bank-breaker when we're casually talking about vehicles worth tens of millions of dollars blowing up, if not being discarded after a single launch.
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?
> 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.
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.
It is however how most software testing is done.
"Most" is a gross exaggeration.
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.
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.
Necessary and sufficient are different concepts.
ah, yes ... there's no success like failure, and failure's no success at all.
> 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.
> 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
"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!
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.
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.
None of the SpaceX orbital launches so far have been fully reusable. The second stage is not recovered.
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…)
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.
What would you say is Jeff Bezos' motivation behind it?
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.
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.
Lots of Americans are only capable of this logic for now: billionaire bad
It's more like pretending to care about earth but living a lifestyle with private jets and yachts: hypocrisy
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.
> 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")
>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)
How does one even go about finding a root cause so exotic?
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, but at the end of the day you can't be sure right? That doubt would eat away at me
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.
> 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.
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.
> This is a crushing setback for Blue Origin.
For SpaceX it would have been a success. /s
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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.
>That is an incorrect but plausible hypothesis. >Do you really think that people can't make such mistakes?
Where did I say that? You just pulled that out of nowhere and then refuted it - strawman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man
> it would hallucinate a plausible sounding but incorrect answer
"Hallucinate" as used in this context does not apply to humans and presupposes a qualitative difference.
I was saying that an AI would more likely hallucinate an incorrect answer than correctly diagnose the root cause failure. At no time was I comparing an AI to a human, thats the bit you made up.
The knee-jerk reaction to pointing out any failure modes of AI with, "but meatbags bad!" is a tiring strawman to deal with. It immediately turns the discussion into something else.
Humans crash millions of cars a year, and you're worried about one dog driver running over four measly people?
So, your message is "Unspecified AI models with or without additional training aren't ready to do aerospace fault analysis and they can lead experienced engineers astray." OK, it might or mightn't be true depending on the free parameters in your statement.
I used the word "likely" meaning there is a chance, your re-phrasing of what I said into a certainty ... and then refuting that certainty, is another textbook strawman argument, you made the same logical fallacy again.
Also I said "intermediate and junior" engineers - meaning INexperienced engineers, not experienced ones, so you quoted me wrong in that part too.