In order to monitor the condition of a liquid rocket engine turbopump in the case of lacking fault samples and prior knowledge about fault modes, and to eliminate the false alarms caused by sensor faults, a novelty detection method based on one-class support vector machine (OCSVM) is introduced. An OCSVM is trained on the basis of normal samples, and is used as turbopump condition monitor. Another OCSVM is trained on the basis of sensor fault samples and is used as sensor fault detector. Turbopump condition monitor detects whether novel events may occur, while sensor fault detector identifies whether novel events detected are caused by sensor faults. The validity of this turbopump condition monitoring and sensor fault recognition method is verified with historical test data.