Oswald Oschin

Welcome to Tech Stuff.

I'm Oswald Oschin, and this is The Week in Tech, where I'm joined by three of the world's most plugged-in reporters to break down what's really happening in tech right now.

Today, we're joined by Taylor Lorenz of UserMag, Kyle Chaker, who writes the Infinite Scroll column for The New Yorker, and Ria Brigotti, tech editor at Semaphore.

Welcome, all.

There was a dramatic scene at Cape Canaveral last week.

A Blue Origin rocket was doing a quote-unquote hot fire test, which is when a rocket's engines are ignited and fired at full power while it remains bolted to the launch pad.

This led to a gigantic apocalyptic mushroom cloud-shaped fireball that filled the entire sky and a statement from Blue Origin that read, we experienced an anomaly during today's hot fire test.

Reid, what's the backstory here?

Look, I think this is just how it works, right?

When you're building a rocket company, stuff blows up.

And I mean, this is like how SpaceX got here.

They blew up countless rockets and

eventually you get there.

I think it's maybe a reminder that SpaceX has been on this road a lot longer and is way ahead of everyone else in the field.

But I think this is great.

I think it's great that we have competition and I think Blue Origin just needs to get there.

There's no

There's no straight line in this business.

Stuff has to blow up.

But this is an important part of NASA's return to the moon project, Project Artemis.