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Comment by us0r | Hacker News Reader

>The payload was suspected to have burned up in the atmosphere after failing to separate perfectly from the upper part of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket

>A SpaceX spokesman told the news service: "We do not comment on missions of this nature, but as of right now reviews of the data indicate Falcon 9 performed nominally."

They are already blaming each other. So if this ends up in court how does that work? Do they find a cleared jury?

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Um, blaming each other? WSJ doesn't know crap. For all we know, the mission was a complete success. And why would someone tell the WSJ otherwise while risking jailtime? Classified mission.

This headline is BS. Which makes sense, as it's written by Andy Pasztor, a well-known SpaceX troll.

I don't see why its so far fetched that a republican staffer who is anti SpaceX would leak a report (or contents of it) to an anti SpaceX journalist. Northrop is trying to save face so of course they are going to point the finger at SpaceX.

Not for classified info, they wouldn't.

Also, Northrop didn't point any fingers at SpaceX. They can't even say anything about the mission as it's classified.

Pick up a newspaper. Classified info is leaked practically daily.

When you lose a billion dollars you are pointing the finger at someone else. This is true in general business and especially with government money.

Clearly it was not a success. Lawmakers were briefed on a failure because it was a failure.

Payload seems to have failed to separate and it burned in the atmosphere. Failure to separate is almost certaionly on SpaceX.

No, SpaceX clearly said it was a success, and that the rocket performed nominally as planned. [s]Payload separation is part of rocket performance, so that means that it performed as planned.[/s](EDIT:Just kidding. Payload adapter was provided by Northrop, so actually separation was Northrop's responsibility. Normally, SpaceX provides the adapter and would be responsible.) Lawmakers would be briefed if it were a classified mission with a misinformation campaign, too.

This is a successful SpaceX launch (and assuming payload sep was even planned, it would've been performed by Northrop Grumman's payload adapter).

EDIT: I should point out that Northrop actually provided the payload adapter and handled integration: https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=43976.msg1...

>Failure to separate is almost certaionly on SpaceX.

One thing to note here, the payload adapter was made by Northrop Grumman instead of SpaceX. If the payload adapter itself failed then that's not on SpaceX even though normally the payload adapter is something that they provide.

There is no blaming going on. SpaceX was contracted to lift Northrop Grumman’s mission into orbit. NG’s mission included their own payload adaptor.

If the payload adaptor failed to deploy the payload correctly, the payload would still be attached to the second stage and upon reentry of the latter NG’s mission would be along for the ride.

This is a top secret mission, nobody is officially saying anything about a failure, it's all just 3rd party speculation.

> "We do not comment on missions of this nature"

...but we'll happily take their money. Maybe I am too much of an idealist but it disappoints me that the greater goals of SpaceX are being partly funded by 'dark dollars'.

I'd much prefer that they left that money on the table and just worked with commercial contracts, instead of associating with the sort of agencies that need secret launches.

That's a great question. I bet the DoD does something like investigate and place fault with an independent way to appeal the ruling.

I bet they don't because it's classified.

log/telemetry information I imagine.

I'd be surprised if SpaceX didn't have in their contracts that "all results are based on the source of truth. the source of truth that you accept is this telemetry data" All care no responsibility essentially.

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