Implication of sabotage adds intrigue to SpaceX investigation | Hacker News Reader

Implication of sabotage adds intrigue to SpaceX investigation

washingtonpost.com

304 pointszonotope150 comments

Interesting comments about this on reddit, namely:

> If SpaceX had ANY and I mean ANY suspicion of foul play they would have called the FBI. The company is not stupid enough to potentially contaminate criminal evidence by running their own investigation along that line. So IF SpaceX was thinking along those lines. It would be the FBI requesting access to the roof. As such I think foul play can be safely removed from the list of possibilities. This is likely just the case of an employee not thinking though the potential PR headache the request would cause.

https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/55at14/spacex_asked...

The Air Force has a Federal level law enforcement agency that is likely the agency involved in the investigation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Air_Force_Office...

Agreed. SpaceX may well have called the FBI at first, who likely would have called in the Air Force, seeing as how they have the expertise in this sort of thing. The FBI was probably involved from day 1, since there are quite a few possible criminal subplots going on here (terrorism - state sponsored or otherwise, sabotage by competitors, etc).

Where would one gain expertise in spaceship sabotage? I've worked with people with strange specialties but that would be a new one.

Joking aside you're definitely right that fbi and air force investigators were looped in day 1.

Joke un-aside, if you can make it, you can break it. Anyone with enough education and determination could sabotage a spaceship.

It's like how the Soviet Union's well-educated computer scientists became capitalist Russia'a taxpaying hackers.

sounds interesting, anywhere i can read more about it?

If you suspect criminal foulplay, you call the FBI. If you suspect blackops by a foreign government, you call the CIA. And they may keep quiet about it.

I like how Stratfor's leaked glossary presented the FBI:

"Federal Bureau of Investigation, aka the Downtown Gang. Very good a breaking up used car rings. Kind of confused on anything more complicated. Fun to jerk with. Not fun when they jerk back."

It used to be that the CIA had no authority to run operations inside the US. Has that changed?

Do they routinely ignore their lack of authority at the request of private entities?

Loopholes, duh

I just watch Sicario last night - pretty good movie actually - a central element to the story is how they operate in US borders.

Is it based on official documents obtained from the CIA? Or is it a made up story?

made up but plausible. A large part of the plot is how they need to work with local agents so they are not "technically" CIA. They are working in some way as consultants in a very dangerous operation.

They operated agents in the US disguised as a variety of laborers and professions during the red scare, both posing as communist/socialist organizers as well as patrons. It was estimated many communist and socialist organizations received a majority of their donations from undercover fbi and CIA agents. In many cases, their meetups were almost all undercover agents.

Counter-Intelligence (as in, foreign governments running operations on U.S. soil) is the jurisdiction of the of the FBI.

CIA might catch wind of things, but it's the FBI that investigates. They work together, but separation is clear.

TIL, thanks!

In fairness, the FBI are political actors. They'd be the last people I'd call if I suspected I was being screwed by Boeing and Lockheed, of all people.

Bingo

Counter argument: I was at a talk given by an FBI agent to a group of system administrators in 2004. The agent urged us to do our own investigating.. audit logs, sniff packets, etc. The reasoning was that our servers and networks were our private property and we could do as we pleased, whereas the FBI is bound by law to seek warrants and be very careful not to violate anyone's rights.

(The bulk of the talk was about computer forensics.)

Until presented with extraordinary evidence, the default assumption should be that this was an unacceptable mistake. Distracting from their sleepless-engineering culture with "sabotage" is unlikely to be fruitful (but worth exhausting in preliminary investigation).

Gee I guess all those times the US space program had things explode were 'unacceptable mistakes' to you as well.

The strut event (in fact, every previous SpaceX failure) was acceptable. Failure on the pad during integration testing, like this, is not.

Dude what are you TALKING about. Astronauts have even died during rehearsal events that were not real launches!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1

I think i read this in another thread here on HN and it applies to this situation quite well too ( imo ).

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity ( I would like to swap stupidity with accident but the gist is the same ) or Don't assume bad intentions over neglect and misunderstanding. - Hanlon's Razor

Two fascinating theories from the comment section @ Wapo ->

"A large stationary target like a rocket is a simple shot for a sniper with a 50 cal rifle from a mile away. . . It was something discussed 30+ years ago: to have Special Forces snipers punch holes in the missiles on mobile launchers that would not be discovered until preparing for launch. Instead of destroying the system the enemy would have wasted time and effort moving to a launch location only to find out that they were incapable of launching."

and

"What the article doesn't mention is that ULA buys its engines from Russia and is a vital part of the Russian rocket program. As a part of ULA's activities, there are Russian engineers with military training in the country legally right now. "

When in doubt blame Putin

Just eyeballing it, it's about 600-700 ft from the center of the pad to the tree line, so perfectly doable -- would cameras have been watching the tree line? If someone had shot from the top of a roof or something, I'd think cameras would have caught him leaving/hiding. It would be very, very obvious they shouldn't be there.

Leaving before anyone could notice you would be a bit more of a problem.

In my experience security is often not as good as people think it is in general, especially when large orgs are involved. Look into all the cases of anti nuke activists sneaking into nuke plants for example, or the endless cyber security compromises of large companies and governments.

A place like the Cape is tough because you have many, many contractors and commercial users along with multiple civilian and military fed personnel and even academics. It's likely full of people trying to get their work done, not playing "if you see something say something."

How secure is the Cape? Anyone got any experience?

When I was there I was taken into the VAB with a group. The SRBs for the next Shuttle launch were there. Nobody else was in there. "Security" consisted of a guy asking if I had any lighters or matches.

>>Leaving before anyone could notice you would be a bit more of a problem.

So you sit. Hope they don't have dogs, wait for dark, then exfiltrate. Hell, there are even ways to counteract dogs.

How many former snipers do you think there are in civilian life? How many smart rednecks who can shoot well enough to hit a rocket-sized target at 300 yards? (hell, I'm in that category...)

Somewhere in the union of those two sets, there may exist somebody with sufficient motivation to pull something like this, and enough spare time to prepare well enough to succeed.

I'm not saying that this is what happened, but I am saying that it's far from impossible.

It takes about 4-5 seconds from the noise to the explosion. Wouldn't that be a pretty slow bullet? I wonder how much evidence of such a thing would be left after an explosion, too.

The bullet may have caused a failure that lead to an explosion a few seconds later.

In which case, hopefully someone has run the video through a Eulerian magnification process ( http://people.csail.mit.edu/mrub/vidmag/ ).

A bullet hitting the rocket would cause ripples in the sheet metal that ought to be visible.

It seems like hitting it directly is feasible, about would this not cause both entry & exit holes? I don't know how detailed the telemetry is/how damaged the tank is, but it seems like it would result in a slightly different failure than a single puncture.

I want to say there wouldn't be an exit hole if it met a bunch of liquid after entering. I think it would just disintegrate but there's not a lot of videos of guys shooting rounds into LOX/RP-1.

> there's not a lot of videos of guys shooting rounds into LOX/RP-1

What a job that would be--Elon tells you to get a slo-mo camera and start target shooting LOX at sniper distances "for research".

Many "non flammable" things burn in LOX. A recently-deformed bullet is hot. I expect it would burn fiercely.

Raufoss in Norway produce specialist explosive anti-materiel 12.7mm rounds that would be suitable, but they don't sell to civilians or even police forces.

Steel-core 7.62x54 would probably do it well enough. And you can buy that by the case, cheap.

All you would really have to do is get fuel dripping out along the surface to a point where it would ignite from heat from the engine exhaust.

Not even. LOX is explosive when it contacts organic matter like wiring harnesses, plus Dewars are very fragile, and breaking the vacuum would result in a lot of boil off.

I did not know this. So it's even easier than I thought to sabotage a rocket launch.

Thanks for replying--I would have gone to my grave not even considering the fact that rocket fuel has oxidizers mixed in, but the search you just sent me on set me straight.

It's not mixed-in, it's in a separate tank. But since the tank is an aluminum alloy (often with copper or lithium mixed in) these days, I wonder about its behavior in the presence of an ignition source (some magnesium in the bullet or perhaps even just friction?).

There's no Dewar vessel on the LV as far as I'm aware of. The surface of the stage is the propellant tank, made of simple Al-Li alloy, several millimeters thick. It works fine because of the large mass of the LOX and the comparatively short time of the stage's operation. You just can't transfer enough heat into the stage naturally in the short twenty or thirty minutes between fueling and launch to cause any trouble.

Before they started supercooling the LOX, it was even easier because heat transfer into LOX tanks is conventionally managed by boil-off (in launchers without supercooled propellants, latent heat keeps the liquid at a stable temperature and a trickle refills the tank continuously until a minute or two before launch).

Oddly, the 'enemy' in that scenario was NATO. Mobile missiles like Pershing and GLCM were primary targets for the Soviet Spetsnaz and they has an array of specialist weapons for the task.

Being a Pershing crewman was actually quite high-risk.

On Netflix there is a documentary on the engines it's quite interesting.

The engines were built just as the USSR was collapsing. The engines use a better grade materials and it uses a more efficient combined pumping system 20% better.

The engines were supposed to be scrapped but one of the guys in management diverted them to a warehouse.

Do you recall the name of the documentary?

"Cosmodrome"

The substance of the doc is good but it gets very repetitive and almost propaganda-esque toward the end

what was the second one you mentioned?

The same documentary with a different name ;) Never have twins, your brain is useless for quite some time afterwards...

Congratulations on your little ones!

We have one baby (she is almost 7 months old now) and my brain feels completely useless. I can't even imagine twins.

Those were the NK-33's used on Antares, until one of them failed and caused the loss in 2014...

The RD-180 in question, by contrast, is newly manufactured specifically for the Atlas rockets.

RD-180 was not manufactured specifically for Atlas. The US got involved in the development and testing once they'd picked the RD-180 but the engine predates the program, and is a direct descendant of the RD-170 to boot.

Good to know.

Thanks.

ULA Atlas V uses newly built RD-180, not stored RD-33 from the 1960s. Both engines use the Russian oxygen rich staged combustion which makes them more fuel efficient than kerolox engines developed in the US.

I hope next time SpaceX put some bullet detectors around the rocket. Although sniper could hit the rocket mid flight, where nothing much you can do I guess.

Do bullet detectors exist? For this big of area?

Also black ops would never do the same trick twice :)

Shotspotter.com

I think it's fair to point out that shotspotter specifically has been criticized for being highly inaccurate in practice.

They're basically just microphones you set up around an area to triangulate the source of any gunshots by sound.

Something like a .50 BMG round has a large report and the flight time is just under 2 seconds at a mile, so anything recording audio in the neighborhood would pick up the distinct crack of a rifle prior to the pad explosion. Some of the noise can be suppressed with a big enough suppression device but the sonic boom is unavoidable. Subsonic ammo is simply not workable at these ranges; that's called 'artillery' and it doesn't have sufficient precision to ensure hitting the rocket.

You can listen to the explosion here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6isMuPfxcI

I hear birds chirping. No rifles.

update: yes, I know Elon mentioned the 'quieter bang' sound and it could well be related, but it doesn't sound anything like the crack of a rifle round.

You're right of course; except for one minor nit, the crack you hear is the sound of the bullet. The sound you hear from the rifle is a thump sound. Indeed most infantry soldiers are trained to estimate distance to a shooter by the delay between the crack sound above your head and the thump that follows; 3 seconds is approximately 1km or 1100 yards.

Elon heard something: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/774153847371501569

Although I also think sabotage such a weak theory.

Yes, that sound is clearly audible in this better version with synchronized audio https://youtu.be/maRTEzlSBLk?t=1m8s

Musk: “Particularly trying to understand the quieter bang sound a few seconds before the fireball goes off… May come from rocket or something else.”

Suppressed 50. Cal sniper rifles is available I believe.

That doesn't do anything about the crack of the hypersonic bullet though unless you use subsonic rounds instead.

Which, due to the drag over several miles, would be an impossible shot.

I've not heard of subsonic rounds being used at distances over five hundred yards, and even that is a very difficult shot for that low velocity.

Try this synchronized sound version, which shifted the entire audio stream. (The one you linked to appeared to only start sync'd audio at the exact explosion moment.)

https://youtu.be/maRTEzlSBLk?t=1m8s

You can hear a distinct and odd metallic noise just before the explosion.

> You can hear a distinct and odd metallic noise just before the explosion.

Which would be very consistent with a bursting tank within the rocket.

I don't know anything about fluid dynamics but I know something about shooting and being shot at. I agree with your comment. I would only add that rifle fire sound can be somewhat directional and depending on the temp, density, humidity, height above ground, and reflectivity of the ground much of the impulse can be dissipated or distorted.

Surely sensors would have picked up the impact a .50 makes. Although I don't know why one would need a .50. It's a heavy round with lots of drop and it's not like the rocket is armored. From what I've read of the relative fragility of rockets you could get by with a very small round in just the right spot.

But you will need accuracy to hit "just the right spot", and to get accuracy at long distance, you need a heavier bullet (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sniper_rifle#Maximum_effecti...: "The recent trend in specialized military sniper rifles is towards larger calibers that offer relatively favorable hit probabilities at greater range"), don't you?

True, but "heavier bullet" does not always mean "larger caliber". Also there's no telling at what distance a sniper team would have to be. Maybe they could be inside of 1km?

Also "just the right spot" could be huge on a rocket. The thing is as wide as a barn.

> I hear birds chirping. No rifles.

There's a very audible boom-like sound at 0:06.

.50 BMG is supersonic but drops in velocity rather quickly, like any other small caliber round. Depending on the position of the shooter (especially if opposite to the recording equipment relative to the LV, for example), chances are that the cameras with mikes recording the LV might have problems hearing it. I'm not sure at what distance it drops into subsonic region but the size of the target should allow for some pretty large distance. Powder load could also be tweaked. One has to assume a shooter with significant resources if a deliberate action against a multiple-$100M target is the premise.

The second comment makes very little sense, RD-180 is already being used as a political football (Russia made noise towards forbidding military payload uplifted with RD-180s, and Congress temporarily banned their use over Crimea in 2015) and USAF and ULA have started investigating replacement engines.

There's an interesting, if a bit overdone documentary on Netflix called "Cosmodrome" concerning those Russian engines.

The biggest problem with the lone-gunman theory is this: what if the rocket was hit in an area that didn't cause an immediate, violent explosion?

If you hit the rocket at all, something will fail, very possibly in a manner that will either be noticed before launch or discovered by a subsequent investigation. A .50 caliber bullet hole with its edges facing inward will not be missed by investigators, if there's anything left to investigate at all.

So, no. Nobody shot the rocket with a sniper rifle, because that would be stupid. They would be very likely to get caught, or to cause detectable damage that would obviously not be SpaceX's fault.

"SpaceX had still images from video that appeared to show an odd shadow, then a white spot on the roof of a nearby building belonging to ULA"

"The SpaceX representative explained to the ULA officials on site that it was trying to run down all possible leads in what was a cordial, not accusatory, encounter"

So they are simply exploring what the white spot/shadow could be? I dont think that necessarily leads them to think it was "sabotage" - just a possible clue in their investigation...

I smell media sensationalism and click bait.

I'm sure the possibility of sabotage or terrorism is being looked at as part of a larger failure tree, but I see no evidence it's a leading contender.

Maybe Bezos (owner of WaPo and Blue Origins) is trying to stir it up? /tinfoil

you have to think what sort of scenario it would be a possible clue to. Scenarios like 'a gull landing on the roof' don't lead to further investigation.

Maybe some kind of focused energy thing (aka laser) instead of kinetic?

Not sure how feasible that would be though.

AFIAK you would need some kind of monster megawatt laser to do that. Those do not fit in tote bags.

No worries. Obviously, this isn't an area I know anything about. Yet. :)

If you want more intrigue, the Swiss Space Systems CEO was kidnapped and severely burned just a few days before the SpaceX incident. Not necessarily a correlation, but points out that you can make enemies in any occupation.

https://www.thelocal.ch/20160905/swiss-space-firm-boss-left-...

" A leader in space technology, S3 aims to make space more accessible by creating low-cost, reusable satellite launchers, a development not welcomed by all in the industry.

Last year the company’s base in Payerne was broken into and equipment damaged, said the Tribune."

Scary! Is there any more info on these attacks?

Looking for more, Paul. This from a Swiss news site says he had previously reported threats to the police, S3's data center was broken into and flooded with a fire hose, and that he remained in the hospital in serious condition with burns on his torso, arm, neck, and face, and would likely need transplants:

http://www.24heures.ch/vaud-regions/patron-s3-sauvagement-ag...

This one speculates on a connection with the SpaceX explosion, but has no new info:

http://www.bilan.ch/techno-plus-de-redaction/pascal-jaussi-u...

Swiss Space's web page's last press release is from 2014. There are threads on reddit and nasaspaceflight also just with speculation and no new info:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Switzerland/comments/518zy3/pascal_...

https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=31278.140

So their plans for 2016 is to "open a spaceport" and for 2017 - "assemble a shuttle". Sounds like either a money laundering setup or a massively overhyped startup. Combine with the fact that they have Russian version of the site and it might be safe to assume that the guy had a run-in with unhappy "investors".

PS. The 24heures news article says that his car was stopped when he was driving through the forest, severly beaten, douzed in gasoline and set on fire. Now that is pretty damn close to how they settled fiscal disputes back in post-Perestroika times. I'm pretty damn sure he just took money from wrong people and didn't deliver what he promised.

This seems to be something that happened a while ago, before they traced it to the upper stage helium tank.

https://spaceflightnow.com/2016/09/23/falcon-9-rocket-explos...

So yes it's something they considered but there wasn't any actual sabotage - it was just a tangent in the investigation.

From the linked article:

The inquiry, led by SpaceX with assistance from government and industry experts, is still looking into the cause of the breach, which may be only a symptom and not the root of the Sept. 1 mishap.

That doesn't mean that the root cause is sabotage nor does it mean it isn't. It just means that root cause analysis has not been completed.

The root cause isn't known but the fact that they can trace it to a failure of the helium containment system nearly rules out sabotage as a contributing factor.

Why do you suggest that rules out sabotage? What better way to cause a rocket to explode than to rupture a high pressure tank inside the oxidizer tank right after it was fueled.

I think it's safe to say that Lockheed and Boeing didn't conspire to blow up a rocket on federal property -- but damn if the idea of Russia infiltrating spetznaz into the US defense industry for sabotage aimed at ensuring their control over the Western world's launch systems isn't a seductive piece of fiction.

No conspiracy is needed.

The whole thing is very unlikely, but if true I'd say the most probable actor would be a lone disgruntled employee or other nutbar with a gun. It would fall in alongside the epidemic of lone nut shootings over the past year only the victim this time was a rocket.

I'd guess the requisite kind of gun and ammo could easily be obtained from among all the military surplus and other serious kit available on the gun show circuit.

This is an oddly victimless crime though. If you know enough to do it, then you know the pad is clear.

It's almost exactly the type of stupid Putin might go in for if it felt deniable.

Conversely there have been telescope lenses that needed to be bullet proofed in transit to stop idiots shooting at them too.

Spacecom - the owners of the destroyed payload satellite - probably don't feel it was a victimless crime.

I know you mean that 'nobody died', which is great, but the loss of a 200 million dollar satellite, a 50 million dollar launch vehicle (both representing tens of thousands of person-hours of work), and several further person-hours of time wastage investigating this incident, and months of delays in future launches... all this could hardly be called 'victimless'.

That's vaguely the plot of The Americans.

It also really happened that the KGB tried to place agents to live normal lives in the US. 60 Minutes featured one of them:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Barsky

He apparently wasn't quite as murderous as The Americans.

>“Particularly trying to understand the quieter bang sound a few seconds before the fireball goes off,” he wrote on Twitter. “May come from rocket or something else.”

They should be able to sync the audio/video and figure out where the quieter bang came from. I can't imagine there was only one camera on the pad. Even easier if they actually sync the video timestamps with a common time signal.

>I can't imagine there was only one camera on the pad.

It's not like this was the launch. It was very possible that most cameras were not recording.

It's a full dress rehearsal, the only difference between static fire and a real launch is that they do not release the hold-down clamps and shut down the engines instead. The cameras would have been rolling.

Synchronized audio: https://youtu.be/maRTEzlSBLk?t=1m8s

A quieter sound just before explosion is audible in this video, although I don't know that I would call it a “bang.”

Entirely possible that this is a leaked PR spin being used to try and cast a more favorable light on the accident by placing blame on an uncontrollable third party and not SpaceX.

My priors have this as the most likely scenario.

If I was any SpaceX competitor other than ULA I would definitely shoot from the ULA facilities. But I also don't think a trained sniper would be so obvious.

This is good context https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=O_azyt1JhI0 for the tension between ULA and SpaceX - it's also nice before an election to checkout the hearings on CSPAn to get a better understanding of the type of people being elected...

For those of you wanting to analyze the current evidence yourself, we've got an analysis board up at: https://www.opensynthesis.org/boards/6/what-caused-the-space.... Sabotage by a non-employee is currently the most consistent explanation

Open Synthesis is currently invite-only while we figure out moderation. Send me an email or apply via the form on the homepage.

There's also an instance you can add/edit information to without an invite or providing your email: https://open-synthesis-sandbox.herokuapp.com/boards/6/what-c...

nice! That is really useful for me to put together the basic facts as now known without sensationalism.

If you're going to go conspiratorial, I'd say that the payload may be the key here.

A lot of comments here seem to be fixated on a sniper firing a bullet. What about a laser?

This is my thought also.

If they had IR cameras, then an IR laser would show up, and everyone would have seen the reflection from a visible light laser strong enough to damage metal at range.

Newspaper promotes improbable scenario to boost readership

If this is the result of sabotage, it puts SpaceX's previous launch failure in a different context: any entity willing and able to take a shot at and destroy a rocket from within the confines of Cape Canaveral might also have been able compromise a strut provided by an outside entity.

I find SpaceX's predicament to be deeply troubling, maybe because if this is sabotage, it casts a pall on the humanity's ability to make progress.

As I recall, the company that made struts was not testing them properly and there was more than a few that did not meet the design spec. Tesla went to a different strut supplier after that.

Sabotage seems totally plausible, considering that one company is making surprising progress towards us becoming a space faring species. Aliens also seems totally plausible, for the same reason.

If we're going to go nuts over pure speculation, I would prefer that we focus on aliens. They are much more entertaining.

< comic book guy voice > It is clear that you are a shill for the time travellers who are obviously the ones who are really behind this. < /comic book guy voice >

Worst. Shill. Ever.

Do not be dissuaded by the downvotes -- as usual around here, they signify that your comment was genuinely funny.

In the 20th century, humorologists thought that the knew the worst kind of humor, humor so bereft of actual humor that it almost wasn't humor. They thought it was the "pun".

The 21st century has proved them wrong. There is in fact a lower form of "for lack of a better category, I guess we'll reluctantly file that under humor". It is the "reference".

Mere references, lacking any other point of interest, do not do well around here. I am comfortable with this.

More social signaling than humor, I tend to think.

The reference, once achieving a certain obscurity, elevates itself to the "inside joke" and is often used as a form of social signaling to promote in-grouping and comradery.

xkcd.com/794

ULA has a 100% success rate. http://www.space.com/30738-united-launch-alliance-100th-rock...

Why does spacex have occasional failures? Do they run their experiments with customers cargos?

Note: I know nothing of the space industry.

1. Both of the rockets ULA currently uses(Delta IV and Atlas V) are much, much older than the rocket that SpaceX is launching. These rockets are on their 4th and 5th iterations, so they've had time to work out basically everything and aren't really pushing the limits of what they can do. Early on, these rockets did not have a 100% success rate. 2. I wouldn't call these experiments. In the past, all experiments(such as the landing attempts) were conducted after the customer payload was delivered so it posed no threat to them. Recently, they started performing static fires with the payload already integrated to save a couple days between the static fire and the launch. I suspect that they will stop after this anomaly.

I guess SpaceX will be installing ShotSpotter at all of their critical infrastructure now.

I wonder how well that would work given the background noise from rocket exhaust.

Spacewars, chapter one

Would really like to hear the sound he refers too. Also to see it graphed on a decibel chart. Anyone know if it's posted somewhere? Will go and look and EDIT, but I doubt I'll find it.

EDIT: here I googled that for myself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maRTEzlSBLk

Here is a video with some audio analysis

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JHhF3QNC8o8&feature=youtu.be

Or maybe it was a bug in the computer simulation that runs us all?

Look, no. That code is totally solid, trust us a little will you?

We also run on checkpoints. If a bug happens, we roll the simulation back to the last checkpoint and you never experience the bug and can enjoy a perfect universe.

You're welcome.

We can’t know for sure. It sure seems like it is while we are looking, but how can we tell anything about what’s going elsewhen?

I heard... the Israeli's might not be happy about an Israeli company going to the US for launching their satellites.

Personally, I'm highly skeptical that this was anything but a mechanical problem with a new rocket.

Where else is a Israeli company going to go to do their launches? It's not like Irael and Russia are bestest buddies, and Israel has a lot of political and financial support from the US. That makes no sense whatsoever.

Well, they could launch in Israel? At least for small (500-800kg) payloads there's the Shavit [1] civilian version of their Jericho ICBM.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shavit

For some uses maybe, but they only launch one every three years or so, in retrograde low earth orbit only and they're reserved for military and government projects. And as you say, cant lift this payload anyway.

The article clearly paints SpaceX as the newcomer and underdog who is trying to compete with the big monopolists. I wonder if there is another side to the story, though. Is anyone involved in the industry who can tell more, or point to good sources?

SpaceX IS the newcomer and underdog, but one that's advancing very quickly. The big monopolist in this case is ULA, the "United Launch Alliance", which was created in 2006 as a joint venture of Lockheed Martin Space Systems and Boeing Defense, Space & Security.

For years, ULA was only option for US government launch contracts. They had more than 100 launches – all of them successful except one single minor anomaly [1].

SpaceX tried and succeeded [2] to get into the lucrative government contract business, arguing that their launches are five times cheaper (90M vs 460M USD).

Before that, an interesting meeting of the U.S. Committee on Armed Services took place [3], discussing ULA's dependency on russian-made RD-180 rocket engines for their Atlas V launch system.

[1] http://www.spacepolicyonline.com/news/ula-traces-atlas-v-ano...

[2] https://spaceflightnow.com/2015/05/27/spacex-cleared-to-laun...

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ff_5jF_3QU

> SpaceX IS the newcomer and underdog

Woah, sorry. I never said they weren't.

> which was created in 2006

That sounds rather new to me, considering that space tech has been around since what, the 60s? If someone told me SpaceX was originally started in 2006 I'd be only slightly surprised, but I'd figure it just took years to attract expertise and set the whole thing up before we start hearing about it.

All I'm asking is for the other side of the story. ULA is being painted as evil here and no matter how true every word from SpaceX's side is, I would always like to read ULA's comments on the matter.

ULA may be new but Boeing and Lockheed Martin are not.

How surprised are you to find out that SpaceX was actually founded in 2002, then?

The other side of what? That SpaceX isn't a newcomer competing with monopolists?

United Launch Alliance is Lockheed and the remains Rockwell. Been around since the beginning of rockets and the Military-Industrial Complex.

> The other side of what? That SpaceX isn't a newcomer competing with monopolists?

Okay they are a newcomer, but I don't know that ULA is the only other player out there. The article sure sounds like it, but it seems a bit odd that nobody else ever develops anything space-related for the US government.

And you forget the second part of my question where I ask for the other side of the story. According to the article, SpaceX had to sue to be accredited, which is weird if there is a normal accreditation process so I am assuming ULA (or someone else?) was causing trouble. Telling the story from only SpaceX's side is always incomplete, now matter how right they might be.

Boeing and Lockheed were the main companies providing launch services, but merged both of their space launch divisions into a joint venture, ULA. Effectively becoming the only player and not having to competitively bid against each other anymore.

And because of that, space launch contracts tended to not be competitively bid. For about a decade, where ULA was the only game in town and they could and did quote any price they could justify with a straight face. One such occasion is what brought SpaceX to sue under antitrust laws. They also had to be certified to take part in the bidding process, but the lawsuit was to force the contracts to get competitively bid in the first place instead of simply being rubber stamped to ULA.

It's called rocket science for a reason. Looking into sabotage usually indicates that they have no clue what happenned and are looking into saving face.

Hopefully, Emdrive or a similar technology works out - otherwise, spacefaring is going to be a risky and overly complicated endeavour for a long time.

I will just say it without any proof. I think spacex is not competent enough to solve this. Rocket science is still hard. That is the impression I got when they said they do not know the cause yet. Rocket exploding on the launch pad is pretty big fuck up in my mind, but I am not a rocket scientist. They will learn from this but this is a reality check. Without major breakthroughs they are no better than russians launching soviet era rockets.

I think it's worth noting that we live a post-Snowden world where the worst conspiracy theories about mass surveillance were indeed true. I wouldn't be surprised if our own government did this to the advantage of the ULA.

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