I think it's also possible that a bad fuel grain slipped through whatever QA process they had. You might count that as insufficient ground testing, though. "Pr

I think it's also possible that a bad fuel grain slipped through whatever QA process they had. You might count that as insufficient ground testing, though. "Problems like these are almost always the result of management pushing things faster than the engineering progress warrants." Coincidentally, we were talking about such an instance today at work, the Conestoga 1620. As relayed to me, the "low frequency noise" mentioned in the wikipedia post was a low frequency structural mode that was missed because management didn't want to pay for a high enough fidelity finite element analysis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conestoga_%28rocket%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conestoga_%28rocket%29