I haven’t commented on this, but the New Scientist has a fairly extensive story of Armadillo’s bad weekend.

What do I think?

First of all, full disclosure. I’m working, as I write this, for one of Armadillo’s competitors, on SBIR proposals. But it’s a close-knit community, even among the competitors.

And having said that, I don’t think it’s a disaster for Armadillo. These kinds of things are going to happen along the way, as we start to understand how to develop operable and affordable space transports (a goal that has eluded both the military and NASA, almost half a century after the dawn of the space age). I also find it interesting (and I have to confess, somewhat amusing) that the failure was fundamentally a software failure, given the pedigree of the company that provided the funds that created the vehicle:

Post-crash analysis has revealed what went wrong