Grok hits 99.9% accuracy spotting rocket debris for SpaceX

SpaceX says xAI's model now outperforms human inspectors at finding foreign object debris in borescope footage SpaceX has put Grok to work on one of aerospace manufacturing’s least glamorous and most consequential jobs: finding stray junk inside rocket parts. The company says xAI’s model now flags foreign object debris in borescope footage with 99.9% accuracy. Human inspectors doing the same task land at approximately 94%. That gap is a big deal when a single missed fragment can end a mission. What SpaceX actually deployed Kiko Dontchev, SpaceX’s Vice President of Launch, announced the deployment on November 9, 2026. Dontchev has spent 16 years at the company. He framed the rollout as a meaningful boost to engineering speed. The task involves a borescope, essentially a thin camera on a flexible tube. Technicians snake it into tight internal spaces in hardware that can’t easily be opened up. The resulting video then has to be reviewed for anything that shouldn’t be there. That “anything” is what the industry calls foreign object debris, or FOD. Think metal shavings left over from machining, or a fastener that ended up somewhere it was never meant to go. Small items, large consequenc...