> 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