Comment Re:Interesting way to sabotage SpaceX (Score 5, Interesting) 220
I believe they would. I worked for American Rocket Company in 1989. They developed hybrid engine IP that SpaceDev now owns.
Anyhow, in the late 80's the owners of what would become AmRoc decided to go into the launch business and build a single stage suborbital proof of concept vehicle. Oxidizer was helium pressurized LOX tank and steered by the injected fuel vector control (60% Hydrogen Peroxide, just a few gallons). It needed a guidance system. I was a new grad hired to help obtain it, and do some of the wiring and testing.
The vendor was in Boulder CO. I forget their name. The name no longer exists because AmRoc's chief competitor, Orbital Sciences Corporation sabotaged AmRoc's avionics contract. How? On the eve of our CDR with this Boulder company, all of the employees quit, except for the two owners and a single tech who'd started the company with them. Why did they quit? Orbital Sciences Corp (now Orbital ATK, after they acquired Alliance earlier this year) hired every one of them out from under their feet promising to open a Boulder office.
And it worked. Instead of a custom designed flight computer, gyros, telemetry, data acquisition and etc., we got an avionics system made from secondhand Japanese gyros, engineering model electronics left at the Boulder shop, and the rest from the Omega catalog. Furthermore, only two gyros were available, and in that case, the Z-axis is the only choice to go uninstrumented. Which meant that the flight profile would have to rely on a simple timer schedule: when to start steering away from vertical, when to separate payload, etc. And when to pull the umbilical cord.
All of these things contributed to the failure mode: which was that the LOX valve (a 2.5" gate valve) became encased in ice after frost from the previous day's rehearsal/test pooled around the valve and then refroze when the LOX was filled on launch day. It actually opened about 10%... enough to light the engine. And the person in charge of manually pulling the umbilicals (a payload customer, not an employee) jumped the gun and didn't wait for visual verification of liftoff... so no command could be given to close the valve and turn off the engine. As a result, the rocket sat on the pad and idled, the timer ran up to the moment when the thrust vector Peroxide started flowing... and the X and Y accelerometers saw no response... so more peroxide flowed. Until it pooled in the flame bucket and caught fire.
We sent a nice big black cloud over Santa Maria that day. You can read about it here. But we did prove how safe a hybrid is: if it had been a solid engine or liquid fueled rocket, there would have been a very large explosion. Instead we effectively had a tire fire.
Amroc laid off 90% of its employees within 2 months. Closed its doors and sold its IP to Westinghouse a couple of years after that. Westinghouse later sold it to SpaceDev. And some very happy very well paid engineers in Boulder Colorado earned some very bad karma.
Do I think that Orbital ATK would pay a third party vendor to skimp a little on Acceptance Testing of critical structural components made for SpaceX?
Why yes. Yes I do.