7 ms·

This is a crushing setback for Blue Origin. I feel for the engineers. They have been the underdogs for so long, but with the recent successful recovery of the

This is a crushing setback for Blue Origin. I feel for the engineers. They have been the underdogs for so long, but with the recent successful recovery of the New Glenn booster, it finally seemed like they had some bragging rights. Now they're looking at a year minimum before they get back to a regular launch rhythm. The question now is: What went wrong? If they're lucky, it's just a stupid mistake. Maybe an incorrect procedure while loading fuel, or maybe a manufacturing error got past QC. If they are unlucky, the cause will be a mystery, and it will take them months to nail down the root cause. Early in Falcon 9's history, the Amos 6 satellite was stacked on the rocket during a routine static fire and the whole thing blew up. It happened so fast that there were only a few bits of telemetry between "everything normal" and "no signal". For a brief moment SpaceX suspected sabotage by rival ULA. They even requested access to a ULA building to see if a sniper could have taken a shot at the rocket. It turned out to be an exotic failure: liquid oxygen had gotten caught inside a buckled liner in the carbon composite pressure vessels. Friction ignited it, and the entire second stage blew up, destroying the rocket.

domlebo70 5mo ago
How does one even go about finding a root cause so exotic?
- elzbardico 5mo ago
  I'd bet lots of telemetry, comprehensive design and change documentation, along with engineers tacit knowledge. Something like: telemetry shows dramatic drop of temperature on this, that given the location of the sensor could only be caused by a specific LOX line leak, and vibration sensors show data compatible with friction as the ignition event and not a short circuit because the relevant telemetry doesn't show any electrical abnormality, so, by exclusion, given no other anomalies, give that computer simulations show it is a feasible scenario, followed by lab work with a physical model, this must be the cause of the accident.
  - domlebo70 5mo ago
    Yeah, but at the end of the day you can't be sure right? That doubt would eat away at me
    - sephamorr 5mo ago
      The doubt is supposed to stay with you! You need to make sure there aren't other causes or contributing factors hiding behind 'the obvious'. There have been notorious cases in spaceflight where the issue was 'identified' and 'fixed', only for the same thing issue to happen in the next mission.
      - mr_toad 5mo ago
        > There have been notorious cases in spaceflight where the issue was 'identified' and 'fixed', only for the same thing issue to happen In software development this is your average weekday.
    - SkyBelow 5mo ago
      Nothing of the level of rocket failure, but I've tracked down issues where you are never sure of the cause. You keep the doubt and let it drive you. You aren't as much sure of a theory, as you have the theory you most want to disprove and keep failing to do so. The more you fail to disprove a given theory while other people with their own personal 'targets' do end up disproving them, the more you can report that the theory is the reasonable conclusion. But you never given up the idea of looking to disprove it. Eventually others join you and work to disprove your theory. As the group continues to fail to disprove it, it becomes the officially stated cause unless someone can provide evidence otherwise. Sometimes I'll have one that I'm stuck on for a month before finally disproving it, and it is an interesting feeling. There is some level of happiness I succeeded at my goal, but it is very bittersweet because it normally was my last working theory and now I'm simply lost until I can formulate a new one. Sometimes disappointment in myself that I might've missed some easy way to disprove it for so long, but other times the way to disprove it was sufficiently hard enough that I just accept it is what it is.
  - 5mo ago
- hackeraccount 5mo ago
  Nah, there'll be a lot of people who think they know what happened and there'll be one person someone at BO who really knows what happened they just don't know they know it yet. In the course of the analysis that person will hear a couple of known facts and there will be feeling in the pit of your stomach when all doubt goes away. Worst case scenario is that it's something they signed off on.
block_dagger 5mo ago
[flagged]
- malux85 5mo ago
  Much more likely is that it would hallucinate a plausible sounding but incorrect answer and send intermediate and junior engineers on a wild goose chase
  - red75prime 5mo ago
    > a plausible sounding but incorrect answer That is an incorrect but plausible hypothesis. Do you really think that people can't make such mistakes? If you want to say that people have understanding, then define understanding in an operationalizable way first. It doesn't mean that I would recommend a general-purpose AI model without additional training to do a fault analysis.
    - malux85 5mo ago
      >That is an incorrect but plausible hypothesis. >Do you really think that people can't make such mistakes? Where did I say that? You just pulled that out of nowhere and then refuted it - strawman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man
      - red75prime 5mo ago
        > it would hallucinate a plausible sounding but incorrect answer "Hallucinate" as used in this context does not apply to humans and presupposes a qualitative difference.
        malux85 5mo ago
        I was saying that an AI would more likely hallucinate an incorrect answer than correctly diagnose the root cause failure. At no time was I comparing an AI to a human, thats the bit you made up.
wahern 5mo ago
Crushing only because their cadence is so slow compared to SpaceX. Their process seems much closer to the highly risk averse methodology of traditional incumbents than to SpaceX's style. Failure becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Rockets are ridiculously complex. Slow-and-steady wins the race makes sense for many individual components, depending on how well understood the problem domain is, and your ability to rigorously model things. But if you take that approach when testing all the thousands of components together, which is simply just too complex to exhaustively model[1], you'll never get anywhere. You have to be prepared to not only break some eggs in epic fashion, but to break many as quickly as you can, so you can parallelize your problem solving and iterate faster. [1] At least without a large multiple in time and monetary expenditure that ends up costing more than even the US (government and private capital combined) is prepared to spend.
- jeffrallen 5mo ago
  Failure is not only an option, but is required. The more smaller failures you have, the more big successes you can have.
  - card_zero 5mo ago
    Well, they just had a failure, so that spells great success, right? I'm unclear on the point of why having a rocket blow up when you're being slow and careful is more of a setback than having one blow up when you aren't.
    - pfdietz 5mo ago
      Necessary and sufficient are different concepts.
    - MarkusQ 5mo ago
      Information theory. If you are doing lots of small, incremental tests, burning through a lot of hardware doing all sorts of characterization and qualifying tests, learning a little bit from each one, you can make steady progress, finding your mistakes as you go. If instead you try to work out everything in painstaking detail, build a small number of prototypes that your calculations assure you should work, and one blow sup, you learn that...your calculations are wrong. Imagine developing software with no CI tests, where you only get to run one full system test every couple of months. Slow and careful means avoiding lots and lots of early learning opportunities.
steve1977 5mo ago
I'm not sure if I would call the vanity project of one of the richest people on earth an "underdog". Btw, "If they're lucky, it's just a stupid mistake" is actually interesting. If you're at that stage and spending so much money, I would consider making stupid mistakes to be catastrophic.
- AdamN 5mo ago
  Sort of - if it's determined that somebody bypassed a safety control they can just make the control firmer and fire that person and move onto other things. If it's some fundamental flaw in the engine design that could set them back months/years.
- imglorp 5mo ago
  BO was founded in 2000 and has about 2 orbital launches with a partly reusable system. They build rockets. SpaceX was founded in 2002 and has around 660 orbital launches with a fully reusable system. They build rocket factories. BO is absolutely the underdog, in every way, unless you want to count 38 suborbital joyrides, then they're ahead at 38 to 0.
  - perilunar 5mo ago
    None of the SpaceX orbital launches so far have been fully reusable. The second stage is not recovered.
- brookst 5mo ago
  Always hope for the stupid mistake. It’s embarrassing but so much better than having the same problem caused by a complex and difficult-to-root-cause issue. After a long day of working on a car I would much rather have it fail to start because I forgot to connect the battery than fail to start because the starter I replaced had been returned to the store by a previous purchaser, with the wrong part in the box, which was mechanically compatible with the mount but not with the flywheel. (Hypothetically speaking…)
- Rover222 5mo ago
  Calling Blue Origin a vanity project is so ridiculous.
xethos 5mo ago
> They even requested access to a ULA building to see if a sniper could have taken a shot at the rocket. > It turned out to be an exotic failure: liquid oxygen had gotten caught inside a buckled liner I gotta say, suspecting "Rival company hired a sniper" before "Dealing with liquid oxygen is very fucking hard and incredibly flammable" feels very Elon
- infinitewars 5mo ago
  The real concern was Russia, given SpaceX has always been a MIC project, now publicly manifest as "Golden Dome" .. a program which undermines M.A.D. and obviously greatly incentives sabotage. There just happened to be a ULA building nearby that was in range and investigated as a possible vector of attack.
  - nixass 5mo ago
    > now publicly manifest as "Golden Dome "Golden" goes perfectly in line with the current president's office decor
    - ted_bunny 5mo ago
      "Home Depot presents the Apparently Gilded Dome" didn't have the same ring
  - panick21_ 5mo ago
    People need to stop with this SpaceX has always been about golden dome theory. Its just a silly conspiricy theory that boils down to, lots of people have worked in the US space industry for a long time.
- coarise 5mo ago
  >feels very Elon why
  - copper-float 5mo ago
    [flagged]
aubanel 5mo ago
"United Launch Alliance (ULA) is an American launch service provider formed in December 2006 as a joint venture between Lockheed Martin Space and Boeing Defense, Space & Security." for those who wondered like me!
MPSimmons 5mo ago
I worked at SpaceX at the time, and I cannot speak for the company, but I can tell you that approximately nobody inside SpaceX took the idea of a sniper seriously. There was a lot of internet talk about it, and it was one of hundreds of avenues that were explored, and ruled out basically as soon as it was explored. The very interesting part of the liquid oxygen failure (and this was published in the investigative findings) was that the liquid oxygen that became trapped in the fibers was actually cooled and compressed into solid oxygen - you can read some details here: https://www.americaspace.com/2017/01/02/spacex-closes-amos-6-investigation-aims-to-launch-10-satellites-next-sunday/ https://www.americaspace.com/2017/01/02/spacex-closes-amos-6...
- Jackson__ 5mo ago
  No one inside SpaceX, except for Elon Musk himself? https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/05/spacex-pushed-sniper-theory-with-the-feds-far-more-than-is-publicly-known/ https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/05/spacex-pushed-sniper-t...
  - bell-cot 5mo ago
    From that article - > The “sniper” theory > The lack of a concrete explanation for the failure led SpaceX engineers to pursue hundreds of theories. One was the possibility that an outside “sniper” had shot the rocket. This theory appealed to SpaceX founder Elon Musk, who was asleep at his home in California when the rocket exploded. Within hours of hearing about the failure, Musk gravitated toward the simple answer of a projectile being shot through the rocket. > This is not as crazy as it sounds, and other engineers at SpaceX aside from Musk entertained the possibility, as some circumstantial evidence to support the notion of an outside actor existed. - which sounds fairly close to "don't get caught dismissing our PHB's current crazy idea".
    - ASalazarMX 5mo ago
      There's a lot, A LOT of money in play here. Technical reasons are usually the cause, but I wouldn't completely discard sabotage if there's some way they could get away with it, if only to improve procedures.
Rebelgecko 5mo ago
>It happened so fast that there were only a few bits of telemetry between "everything normal" and "no signal". SpaceX also had an architecture that added a lot of latency to their telemetry transmission (IIRC basically Ethernet bufferbloat)
- GMoromisato 5mo ago
  This is a good article about Amos-6: https://www.americaspace.com/2017/01/02/spacex-closes-amos-6-investigation-aims-to-launch-10-satellites-next-sunday/ https://www.americaspace.com/2017/01/02/spacex-closes-amos-6... "Investigators scoured more than 3,000 channels of video and telemetry data covering a very brief timeline of events – there were just 93 milliseconds from the first sign of anomalous data to the loss of the second stage, followed by loss of the vehicle." I haven't seen anything about latency--are you sure that's a problem in the telemetry stack?
  - Rebelgecko 5mo ago
    It featured heavily in the CRS-7 anomaly investigation (https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/public_summary_nasa_irt_spacex_crs-7_final.pdf https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/public_summa...). > SpaceX’s new implementation (for Falcon 9 “Full Thrust” flights) of non- deterministic network packets in their flight telemetry increases latency, directly resulting in substantial portions of the anomaly data being lost due to network buffering in the Stage 2 flight computer. However it looks that finding might've actually been corrected in the months before Amos-6, so moot point!
chasd00 5mo ago
> Maybe an incorrect procedure while loading fuel, or maybe a manufacturing error got past QC. The water was on when it exploded so it had to be an event very close to ignition. Before the big explosion there was a large intense fire at the bottom but the upper stage exploded before the fire had heated that part of the rocket. Will be interesting to read about what caused it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaR6yEE-Myo&t=128s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaR6yEE-Myo&t=128s
hulitu 5mo ago
> This is a crushing setback for Blue Origin. For SpaceX it would have been a success. /s
- GMoromisato 5mo ago
  The difference is the 'U' in Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly. Blue Origin just had an "unscheduled" disassembly, whereas the latest Starship explosion in the Indian Ocean was "scheduled"--it was meant to happen that way and no one was surprised.

domlebo70 5mo ago

How does one even go about finding a root cause so exotic?

elzbardico 5mo ago
I'd bet lots of telemetry, comprehensive design and change documentation, along with engineers tacit knowledge. Something like: telemetry shows dramatic drop of temperature on this, that given the location of the sensor could only be caused by a specific LOX line leak, and vibration sensors show data compatible with friction as the ignition event and not a short circuit because the relevant telemetry doesn't show any electrical abnormality, so, by exclusion, given no other anomalies, give that computer simulations show it is a feasible scenario, followed by lab work with a physical model, this must be the cause of the accident.
- domlebo70 5mo ago
  Yeah, but at the end of the day you can't be sure right? That doubt would eat away at me
  - sephamorr 5mo ago
    The doubt is supposed to stay with you! You need to make sure there aren't other causes or contributing factors hiding behind 'the obvious'. There have been notorious cases in spaceflight where the issue was 'identified' and 'fixed', only for the same thing issue to happen in the next mission.
    - mr_toad 5mo ago
      > There have been notorious cases in spaceflight where the issue was 'identified' and 'fixed', only for the same thing issue to happen In software development this is your average weekday.
  - SkyBelow 5mo ago
    Nothing of the level of rocket failure, but I've tracked down issues where you are never sure of the cause. You keep the doubt and let it drive you. You aren't as much sure of a theory, as you have the theory you most want to disprove and keep failing to do so. The more you fail to disprove a given theory while other people with their own personal 'targets' do end up disproving them, the more you can report that the theory is the reasonable conclusion. But you never given up the idea of looking to disprove it. Eventually others join you and work to disprove your theory. As the group continues to fail to disprove it, it becomes the officially stated cause unless someone can provide evidence otherwise. Sometimes I'll have one that I'm stuck on for a month before finally disproving it, and it is an interesting feeling. There is some level of happiness I succeeded at my goal, but it is very bittersweet because it normally was my last working theory and now I'm simply lost until I can formulate a new one. Sometimes disappointment in myself that I might've missed some easy way to disprove it for so long, but other times the way to disprove it was sufficiently hard enough that I just accept it is what it is.
- 5mo ago
hackeraccount 5mo ago
Nah, there'll be a lot of people who think they know what happened and there'll be one person someone at BO who really knows what happened they just don't know they know it yet. In the course of the analysis that person will hear a couple of known facts and there will be feeling in the pit of your stomach when all doubt goes away. Worst case scenario is that it's something they signed off on.

block_dagger 5mo ago

[flagged]

malux85 5mo ago
Much more likely is that it would hallucinate a plausible sounding but incorrect answer and send intermediate and junior engineers on a wild goose chase
- red75prime 5mo ago
  > a plausible sounding but incorrect answer That is an incorrect but plausible hypothesis. Do you really think that people can't make such mistakes? If you want to say that people have understanding, then define understanding in an operationalizable way first. It doesn't mean that I would recommend a general-purpose AI model without additional training to do a fault analysis.
  - malux85 5mo ago
    >That is an incorrect but plausible hypothesis. >Do you really think that people can't make such mistakes? Where did I say that? You just pulled that out of nowhere and then refuted it - strawman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man
    - red75prime 5mo ago
      > it would hallucinate a plausible sounding but incorrect answer "Hallucinate" as used in this context does not apply to humans and presupposes a qualitative difference.
      - malux85 5mo ago
        I was saying that an AI would more likely hallucinate an incorrect answer than correctly diagnose the root cause failure. At no time was I comparing an AI to a human, thats the bit you made up.

wahern 5mo ago

Crushing only because their cadence is so slow compared to SpaceX. Their process seems much closer to the highly risk averse methodology of traditional incumbents than to SpaceX's style. Failure becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Rockets are ridiculously complex. Slow-and-steady wins the race makes sense for many individual components, depending on how well understood the problem domain is, and your ability to rigorously model things. But if you take that approach when testing all the thousands of components together, which is simply just too complex to exhaustively model[1], you'll never get anywhere. You have to be prepared to not only break some eggs in epic fashion, but to break many as quickly as you can, so you can parallelize your problem solving and iterate faster. [1] At least without a large multiple in time and monetary expenditure that ends up costing more than even the US (government and private capital combined) is prepared to spend.

jeffrallen 5mo ago
Failure is not only an option, but is required. The more smaller failures you have, the more big successes you can have.
- card_zero 5mo ago
  Well, they just had a failure, so that spells great success, right? I'm unclear on the point of why having a rocket blow up when you're being slow and careful is more of a setback than having one blow up when you aren't.
  - pfdietz 5mo ago
    Necessary and sufficient are different concepts.
  - MarkusQ 5mo ago
    Information theory. If you are doing lots of small, incremental tests, burning through a lot of hardware doing all sorts of characterization and qualifying tests, learning a little bit from each one, you can make steady progress, finding your mistakes as you go. If instead you try to work out everything in painstaking detail, build a small number of prototypes that your calculations assure you should work, and one blow sup, you learn that...your calculations are wrong. Imagine developing software with no CI tests, where you only get to run one full system test every couple of months. Slow and careful means avoiding lots and lots of early learning opportunities.

steve1977 5mo ago

I'm not sure if I would call the vanity project of one of the richest people on earth an "underdog". Btw, "If they're lucky, it's just a stupid mistake" is actually interesting. If you're at that stage and spending so much money, I would consider making stupid mistakes to be catastrophic.

AdamN 5mo ago
Sort of - if it's determined that somebody bypassed a safety control they can just make the control firmer and fire that person and move onto other things. If it's some fundamental flaw in the engine design that could set them back months/years.
imglorp 5mo ago
BO was founded in 2000 and has about 2 orbital launches with a partly reusable system. They build rockets. SpaceX was founded in 2002 and has around 660 orbital launches with a fully reusable system. They build rocket factories. BO is absolutely the underdog, in every way, unless you want to count 38 suborbital joyrides, then they're ahead at 38 to 0.
- perilunar 5mo ago
  None of the SpaceX orbital launches so far have been fully reusable. The second stage is not recovered.
brookst 5mo ago
Always hope for the stupid mistake. It’s embarrassing but so much better than having the same problem caused by a complex and difficult-to-root-cause issue. After a long day of working on a car I would much rather have it fail to start because I forgot to connect the battery than fail to start because the starter I replaced had been returned to the store by a previous purchaser, with the wrong part in the box, which was mechanically compatible with the mount but not with the flywheel. (Hypothetically speaking…)
Rover222 5mo ago
Calling Blue Origin a vanity project is so ridiculous.

xethos 5mo ago

> They even requested access to a ULA building to see if a sniper could have taken a shot at the rocket. > It turned out to be an exotic failure: liquid oxygen had gotten caught inside a buckled liner I gotta say, suspecting "Rival company hired a sniper" before "Dealing with liquid oxygen is very fucking hard and incredibly flammable" feels very Elon

infinitewars 5mo ago
The real concern was Russia, given SpaceX has always been a MIC project, now publicly manifest as "Golden Dome" .. a program which undermines M.A.D. and obviously greatly incentives sabotage. There just happened to be a ULA building nearby that was in range and investigated as a possible vector of attack.
- nixass 5mo ago
  > now publicly manifest as "Golden Dome "Golden" goes perfectly in line with the current president's office decor
  - ted_bunny 5mo ago
    "Home Depot presents the Apparently Gilded Dome" didn't have the same ring
- panick21_ 5mo ago
  People need to stop with this SpaceX has always been about golden dome theory. Its just a silly conspiricy theory that boils down to, lots of people have worked in the US space industry for a long time.
coarise 5mo ago
>feels very Elon why
- copper-float 5mo ago
  [flagged]

aubanel 5mo ago

"United Launch Alliance (ULA) is an American launch service provider formed in December 2006 as a joint venture between Lockheed Martin Space and Boeing Defense, Space & Security." for those who wondered like me!

MPSimmons 5mo ago

I worked at SpaceX at the time, and I cannot speak for the company, but I can tell you that approximately nobody inside SpaceX took the idea of a sniper seriously. There was a lot of internet talk about it, and it was one of hundreds of avenues that were explored, and ruled out basically as soon as it was explored. The very interesting part of the liquid oxygen failure (and this was published in the investigative findings) was that the liquid oxygen that became trapped in the fibers was actually cooled and compressed into solid oxygen - you can read some details here: https://www.americaspace.com/2017/01/02/spacex-closes-amos-6-investigation-aims-to-launch-10-satellites-next-sunday/ https://www.americaspace.com/2017/01/02/spacex-closes-amos-6...

Jackson__ 5mo ago
No one inside SpaceX, except for Elon Musk himself? https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/05/spacex-pushed-sniper-theory-with-the-feds-far-more-than-is-publicly-known/ https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/05/spacex-pushed-sniper-t...
- bell-cot 5mo ago
  From that article - > The “sniper” theory > The lack of a concrete explanation for the failure led SpaceX engineers to pursue hundreds of theories. One was the possibility that an outside “sniper” had shot the rocket. This theory appealed to SpaceX founder Elon Musk, who was asleep at his home in California when the rocket exploded. Within hours of hearing about the failure, Musk gravitated toward the simple answer of a projectile being shot through the rocket. > This is not as crazy as it sounds, and other engineers at SpaceX aside from Musk entertained the possibility, as some circumstantial evidence to support the notion of an outside actor existed. - which sounds fairly close to "don't get caught dismissing our PHB's current crazy idea".
  - ASalazarMX 5mo ago
    There's a lot, A LOT of money in play here. Technical reasons are usually the cause, but I wouldn't completely discard sabotage if there's some way they could get away with it, if only to improve procedures.

Rebelgecko 5mo ago

>It happened so fast that there were only a few bits of telemetry between "everything normal" and "no signal". SpaceX also had an architecture that added a lot of latency to their telemetry transmission (IIRC basically Ethernet bufferbloat)

GMoromisato 5mo ago
This is a good article about Amos-6: https://www.americaspace.com/2017/01/02/spacex-closes-amos-6-investigation-aims-to-launch-10-satellites-next-sunday/ https://www.americaspace.com/2017/01/02/spacex-closes-amos-6... "Investigators scoured more than 3,000 channels of video and telemetry data covering a very brief timeline of events – there were just 93 milliseconds from the first sign of anomalous data to the loss of the second stage, followed by loss of the vehicle." I haven't seen anything about latency--are you sure that's a problem in the telemetry stack?
- Rebelgecko 5mo ago
  It featured heavily in the CRS-7 anomaly investigation (https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/public_summary_nasa_irt_spacex_crs-7_final.pdf https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/public_summa...). > SpaceX’s new implementation (for Falcon 9 “Full Thrust” flights) of non- deterministic network packets in their flight telemetry increases latency, directly resulting in substantial portions of the anomaly data being lost due to network buffering in the Stage 2 flight computer. However it looks that finding might've actually been corrected in the months before Amos-6, so moot point!

chasd00 5mo ago

> Maybe an incorrect procedure while loading fuel, or maybe a manufacturing error got past QC. The water was on when it exploded so it had to be an event very close to ignition. Before the big explosion there was a large intense fire at the bottom but the upper stage exploded before the fire had heated that part of the rocket. Will be interesting to read about what caused it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaR6yEE-Myo&t=128s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaR6yEE-Myo&t=128s

hulitu 5mo ago

> This is a crushing setback for Blue Origin. For SpaceX it would have been a success. /s

GMoromisato 5mo ago
The difference is the 'U' in Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly. Blue Origin just had an "unscheduled" disassembly, whereas the latest Starship explosion in the Indian Ocean was "scheduled"--it was meant to happen that way and no one was surprised.