Is it normal the the report would not be public? I'm not often an FAA report enjoyer, but I would quite like to read this one!
Between that and the fact that the details of the failures and fixes would probably reveal a lot of SpaceX proprietary design info, it's totally unsurprising the full report is not publicly releasable.
I thought SpaceX made their IP freely available.
You might be confused by the fact that they don't file a lot of parents. That's only because they know countries like China and North Korea will just use the parents like a recipe book.
Musk has stated in the past that they are explicitly not patenting things or providing IP details freely to prevent other nations from using said IP.
He said he would open-source a "hyperloop patent" but that's dumb, as he didn't come up with it.
They phrase it as having 'an open-source philosophy', but what it really boils down to is that they continue to file patents[0], but choose not to use those patents in an anti-competitive manner, only 'defensively' (on their word).
Now this isn't attempting to conflate patents with 'open-source', but that ship sailed after Elon's memo regarding the concept in 2014.[1]
[0]: https://ppubs.uspto.gov/pubwebapp/static/pages/ppubsbasic.ht... [1]: https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-you
Trucks aren’t dual use in the same way rockets are.
But we have safeguards in place around SpaceX (at least, that's what it looks like). Trucks are readily accessible.
Trucks are dual use. Like almost everything else.
WMD are called WMD because those weapons are capable of mass destruction. At the scale of cities or entire urban regions (tens of millions of individuals) for a single weapon deployment. Possible more for chemical, radiological, or biological weapons.
The most egregious attack you list saw 86 fatalities. A large number, yes, but fewer than might be caused by, say, a train derailment or collision particularly where riderships are high. (The worst rail accident in Indian history killed up to 800 at Bihar in 1981 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bihar_train_derailment>, as many as 1,700 or more in Sri Lanka following the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Sri_Lanka_tsunami_train_w...>; and Europe's worst rail incident at Ciurea in 1917 killed 800--1,000 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciurea_rail_disaster>.)
Even allowing that, say, the truck bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 had been successful, casualties would likely have been on the order of thousands of deaths, and that's a fairly maximal potential (the original twin-towers WTC saw daily occupancy of about 50k people maximum, though the capacity was as much as six times higher). The 1993 Oklahoma City Bombing of the Murrah Federal Building, a far more typical urban structure, killed 168.
Compare with the loss of life from what are now considered small nuclear weapons, air-dropped rather than missile-delivered, at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with a combined death toll of from 129 to 226 thousand. Attacks from modern ICBMs could kill many millions.
Vehicle attacks can be mitigated by reasonably simple countermeasures including spike strips, webbing, barricades, blast walls, and bollards. Intercontinental-range missiles pose a somewhat greater challenge.
<https://yewtu.be/watch?v=yGeOvLgB9U4>
<https://yewtu.be/watch?v=N_OhTL8TYpk>
<https://yewtu.be/watch?v=XOBvB2ZUuP4>
<https://yewtu.be/watch?v=4JBgnhnMOtY> (Warning: loud soundtrack)
<https://yewtu.be/watch?v=Zp85-dBwslE>
Soft targets are of course always vulnerable (by definition). But countermeasures, rapid responses, and surveillance against planned attacks can help minimise total risk.
Is what I was responding to and I only observed that more people have died from truck attacks than from rocket attacks. You'd have to go back all the way to WWII V-weapons to show alternatives but these weren't dual use at all, the 'V' stands for 'Vergeltungswaffen' which is revenge weapon, I don't think anybody would argue they were 'dual use' until many years later some of the technology that went into them was repurposed by von Braun et al to create the American space program. Though I'm sure that the engineers may have thought at the time that they were busy with space travel.
Besides that only one of those really was a rocket, the others are more like primitively guided flying bombs.
SpaceX makes dual use hardware, and just dropping a SpaceX Falcon 9 on some city without a payload would be illustration of that dual use. Trucks normally carry goods from one place to another. But they can also be repurposed as weapons and a single truck attack roughly matches the number of casualties of the V2 rocket attacks, with one hit on a cinema killing more people than the truck attacks but on average the truck attacks appear to be far more deadly. The V2, from a statistics point of view was a complete failure, on average 2 casualties per rocket built and fired, truck attacks kill far more people on average.
And even if they are 'easy to defend' against in principle they aren't easy to defend against in practice because there will always be times when large crowds are present near a road giving access. There must be millions of such situations every year and the vast bulk of them are not protected at all.
The more salient problem is that that really isn't the relevant consideration. In a risks-based assessment, military and security planners in general put far more weight on adversaries who have access to missiles (particularly those with both range and effective targeting and/or navigational capabilities) than they do those who can make, buy, beg, borrow, or steal trucks. And that has implications for incident investigation reports.
It's not about dual purpose. It's about overall strategic threat.
A truck (absent explosives) might kill a few tens of people in direct vicinity if applied against a crowd. It's not going to strike tens, hundreds, or thousands of kilometers away, without warning. Trucks cannot be unleashed against an adversary half a world away within 45 minutes, as a ballistic missile can. Few trucks have been observed travelling faster than the speed of sound, let alone at the hypersonic velocities of an ICBM.
Again: it's not about dual purpose. It's about the overall threat.
And the far more reasonable response to JumpCrisscross would have been to point out the weakness of their argument, replacing it with the far more relevant argument (as I've laid out here), and assessing the initial concern, which psunavy03 expressed clearly:
The same technology that lets you put a payload in space can let you put a nuclear (or conventional) warhead over a city. The first space launchers were repurposed ICBMs, and so space tech falls under ITAR and other export controls.
Which is a plausible and sufficient explanation of why NTSB investigations of rocket incidents are not made public in the same exhaustive detail as one of a truck-based highway accident.
Sometimes it's useful to pull back and look at the overall picture and see if your argument makes sense.
Far fewer entities have access to ICBMs though than to trucks so let's hope that those with that level of access will remain composed enough not to use them. The chances of that are not all that good at the moment, too many idiots with access to them.
I'd focused on ICBMs as those are the most likely application of SpaceX-scale technology --- certainly Starship, but also Falcon.
That said, far smaller rockets from tactical (< 300 km) to theatre (< 3,500 km) can be and have been devastating. Some are used for precision strikes, and designs such as the US "flying ginsu" are tasked with killing a single individual or small group, others are intended for specific and limited targets --- command-and-control sites, individual ships, bunkers, or installations. Interestingly, it's the less sophisticated weapons which tend to be used as if not weapons of mass destruction, then weapons of mass terror. Russian dumb bombs have relatively low individual kill efficacy, but at scale threaten and intimidate entire cities and populations. Their inaccuracy and randomness are part of their terror effect.
I'm reminded that Adam Smith commented on this effect in Wealth of Nations, in one of only two passages which contain the word "invisible", this being the one in which it appears twice:
Regularity, order, and prompt obedience to command are qualities which, in modern armies, are of more importance towards determining the fate of battles than the dexterity and skill of the soldiers in the use of their arms. But the noise of firearms, the smoke, and the invisible death to which every man feels himself every moment exposed as soon as he comes within cannon-shot, and frequently a long time before the battle can be well said to be engaged, must render it very difficult to maintain any considerable degree of this regularity, order, and prompt obedience, even in the beginning of a modern battle. Regularity, order, and prompt obedience to command are qualities which, in modern armies, are of more importance towards determining the fate of battles than the dexterity and skill of the soldiers in the use of their arms. But the noise of firearms, the smoke, and the invisible death to which every man feels himself every moment exposed as soon as he comes within cannon-shot, and frequently a long time before the battle can be well said to be engaged, must render it very difficult to maintain any considerable degree of this regularity, order, and prompt obedience, even in the beginning of a modern battle.
<https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_V/...>
And those short- and intermediate-range missiles do seem to be gaining in spread and use, along with aerial and sea-based drones. The idiots are gaining access.
What drones offer is a combination of both range and targetablity. Current limitations are on either remote control, where range, detection, and jamming are all considerations, and autonomous operation, with the usual problems of attainability as well as moral and philosophical dilemmas over removing the human from the loop.
A 9/11-style attack still relies on a significant aircraft, and there's a trade-off between drone-size and damage which can be inflicted. Much the destructive power of the 9/11 attacks came from tonnes of aviation fuel which were distributed through the crash sites (north & south WTC towers, and the Pentagon). Small aircraft don't have similar destructive potential. A payload of ANFO or other high-explosive could change that dynamic, though it's interesting to note that liquid hydrocarbon fuels carry roughly 10x the total energy potential of most explosives, though the delivery of that energy is over time --- heating rather than concussive impact.
More likely would be the spread of highly-targeted long-range attacks, which have been something of a specialty of the US over the past several years. "Softer" rather than "soft" targets of significant (though not necessarily executive) politicians, heads of significant companies or organisations, or other key personnel, could become much more common.
Addenda to my prior comment: the V-1 and V-2, along with urban bombing campaigns, are all earlier versions of mass terror weapons. Not tactical in application (aerial bombing was tremendously ineffective against specific targets in WWII), but effective in terrorising entire populations. In the case of the British Isles, this was the first time since 1066 that an invading force was effective at projecting power into the islands, and in being able to harm civilians at will. The psychological and morale effects were profound.
And indeed the V1 and V2 were weapons of fear, not weapons of mass destruction. Except for that lucky hit if you compute the average #kills / weapon they were complete failures. This in part was due to the poor targeting capability of the time, as well as the limited payload.
Targeting was entirely inertial. The circular error probability (radius within which 50% of launches landed) was 4.5 km. 100% landed within 18 km of target.
<http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/v2.htm>
<https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/8426/how-good-was-...>
Effective countermeasures were limited to destroying or disabling launch sites and misinforming the enemy about target locations.
Every time there is a mishap, two investigations run concurrently. The Aircraft Mishap Board conducts a safety investigation, and another officer conducts a legal investigation to ascertain criminal culpability. The safety investigation takes priority for resources, access to evidence, etc. The legal investigation is FOIA-able. The safety investigation is privileged and confidential under Federal law, cannot be released to the public, and individuals who testify for it are granted immunity. The goal is to ensure that everyone's cards are on the table and to have complete transparency in private, so that the proper corrective actions can occur.
The investigation reports go up the chop chain to a general officer or flag officer who is authorized to approve them, and each commander along the way can offer their comments or propose alternative interpretations of the evidence. The approving commander then orders the proper changes in procedures or rules to be applied, or orders discipline or administrative sanctions if warranted.
And yes, if classified information was deemed germane to an investigation because it related to one of the assessed causal factors, the investigation would be classified appropriately. Or perhaps there might be a classified annex attached to an otherwise unclassified report to simplify handling, with notes saying "see reference (a)." when appropriate. Or if Controlled Unclassified Information was involved, that information would be blocked from release if there was ever a FOIA.
I'm an aviation guy, so I've only ever looked at aviation related NTSB reports, but whenever a final report is issued, the full investigation docket is also released which includes a ton of raw evidence and investigatory information.
That seems reasonable since obviously it isn't the FAA's job to dictate how specific fixes should be done, their role is just to ensure that the safety issues from last time have been addressed satisfactorily.