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Comment by Robotbeat | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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