mkent: Valid point. We will have to wait for more information, which will be slow arriving because this is a European investigation. That slowness however will certainly hurt these businesses, as the cloud over their work will hang there, even if it wasn’t their work that caused the issue.

The failure of this particular engine also badly damages the future of the two Ukrainian contractors, Yuzhnoye and Yuzhmash, who built it. They have lost all business with Russia because of the war between those two countries, and now have this failure to darken their resume with the rest of the world.

Do Yuzhnoye and Yuzhmash build the entire fourth stage or just the engine? Initial indications are that propulsion was nominal. The failure likely resulted from an assembly error in the fourth stage, so the engine was not at fault.

That may not salvage the contractors’ future if one of their biggest customers drops the product line, but is it really their fault?