On February 1, 2003, Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated during re-entry, killing all seven astronauts aboard. The cause? A piece of foam insulation that struck the wing during launch.
Unvalidated Assumptions Destroy Systems
But here's what makes this relevant to every cloud provider today: NASA knew foam shedding happened. They'd seen it on dozens of previous flights. The unspoken assumption was that it was "normal" and "acceptable."
NASA's implicit invariant was: "Foam strikes during launch are common and non-fatal." This assumption was never formally validated. It was just... accepted. Over time, the organization normalized this deviance.
Sound familiar?
Every major cloud provider has their own "foam shedding" — small configuration drifts, deployment timing assumptions, internal service dependencies that work "most of the time."
The Cloudflare outage in November 2025? An unspoken assumption about edge propagation timing. The CrowdStrike incident in July 2024? An implicit invariant about config validation that was "known but accepted."
After Challenger and Columbia, NASA implemented formal requirement that every assumption must be explicitly modeled and continuously validated. Not checked once. Not assumed safe. Continuously proven safe.
The space industry learned this lesson at the cost of 14 lives.
The cloud industry is learning it at the cost of billions in revenue and trust — one cascading outage at a time.
Aviation eliminated this class of failure by making implicit invariants impossible. Every assumption is codified. Every state transition is verified. Every configuration change is proven safe before it reaches production.
The technology exists. The discipline exists. The precedent exists.
NASA knew foam shedding happened. They'd seen it on dozens of previous flights. The unspoken assumption was that it was 'normal' and 'acceptable.'
What we lack is the willingness to admit that "it usually works" is not engineering — it's gambling.
Want to see how RCP solves this?
Email us at bparanj@zepho.com.