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Comment by craftyguy | Hacker News Reader

It could also be that the last test they planned to execute resulted in the 'anomaly'.. Not every public communication is subterfuge even though the armchair detectives in the HN comment section always seems to think it is.

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Right. It means exactly what it means. Actual test did not match expectation. Thus, there is an anomaly. Sometimes that means "boom" and sometimes that means bad sensor and sometimes it means the result was outside the margin and they need to do a thorough analysis before retest.

"Anomaly" implies this is not the case.

No, anomaly means there was an outcome which was not expected. It says nothing about how many tests they were going to execute (if any), what the unexpected outcome was, or what the lead test engineer ate for breakfast that morning.

That's the dictionary definition of "anomaly". But that's not the interesting part, what's tickling us armchair detectives is how it got into the press release: "anomaly" is a bit of an anomaly itself, most people would never use that term unless specifically to play something down. That surely is no proof, enough to inspire speculation.

Speaking of speculation, there could be quite a few speculators in this thread that are invested in SpaceX. The downplaying of the actual event could be their own way to shape the stock price.

Isn’t SpaceX private?

It is not a publicly traded stock.

It sounds like a good thing: 'we passed so many tests successfully!'

But it also sounds like kind of a bad thing that it's the last test: 'holy cow - that was close - thank god we had the last test in there.'

Without knowing the specifics of what they were testing every time that might be irrelevant, but if it was multiple test fires of the same engine and only the last one caught the problem, that's scary.

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