A Different View with Dave O’Connell

If you’re ever in a tight corner and desperately need to turn a career-ending negative into a party-popping positive, then the man you have to call is John Insprucker.

John is officially known as the principal integration engineer for Elon Musk’s Space X rocket project, which is the megalomaniac’s endeavour to fly people to faraway planets – although in reality it seems to be more of an effort to burn money by manufacturing multi-billion-dollar fireworks which explode within seconds of lift-off.

One of these rockets took off in a cloud of smoke and publicity last week and promptly disintegrated while still within sight of the launch pad – which it scorched to a cinder in the process.

This rapidly moving drama cost the arbiter of Twitter’s blue tick somewhere between two and three billion dollars – despite the fact that there are helium balloons that have flown higher and lasted longer, and they didn’t shower the earth with residue after imploding.

So a disaster by any definition, you’d have thought – unless you were John Insprucker, who is blessed with such an effervescent personality that he would still see a glass half-full even if it was shattered on a stone floor in front of him with the drink all spilled down the front of his pants.

No, according to John, this was not so much a disaster as a cause for unbridled celebration.

To put a name on it, this was in fact a ‘rapid unscheduled disassembly’ – a phenomenon so normal in the Space Race that there’s even an acronym for it.

It’s a RUD for short – or in layman’s terms, it spontaneously combusted before our very eyes.

Ultimately you can call it what you like but imagine in any other context; if per chance you blew up the company’s pet project – and in fairness that’s not what happened here; it blew itself up – chances are you’d be peppering it when asked for an explanation.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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