SpaceX pushed "sniper" theory with the feds
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Nobody flipped through the manifest of a fuel tank shipment to see they needed to be stored in liquid nitrogen. Someone put the shipment in frozen storage according to the label and the dry ice the tank was packed in evaporated. Cracks formed from the expansion.
Weeks or months later, someone noticed the improperly stored tank and tossed it into a tank of liquid nitrogen. The cracks shrank too small to see on the X-ray inspection. There was no inventory tracking within the freezer area.
When the fuel tank was filled with liquid oxygen, the cracks leaked, pure oxygen hit a spark, and boom.
Source: a .Net/Typescript engineer who responded to the accident by porting the quality assurance ERP system to their new ERP, Warp.
Probably the most fun day of work in those technicians' lives.
Investigations into the catastrophic unscheduled disassembly were looking into internal failures as early as 1 week after the incident.
The 50cal used to shoot the tank was indeed fun and cool, everyone gathered around to watch the explosion.
After 10 months of investigation and destructive testing, the source of the explosion was discovered.
The trial and error necessary to find the cause led to an incredbly McGuyvered testing process/device.
Eventually this led to Space-X developing and building a new in-company supply chain for 1 specific part of the rocket that had been previously outsourced.
To my knowledge Gen 2 and Gen 3 of this part have never failed but I haven't been looking that closely till Starship trials started.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/128591386-the-eighth-con...
Not entirely unheard of.
A certain vintage of Ford cars had a cruise control defect that led them to catch fire while parked (something to do with a switch connected to the brake hydraulics that was connected to +12V from the battery even while the car was off). There were, I believe, multiple rounds of recalls (as the problem manifested itself across a number of different models).
In one case I'm familiar with, the car's owners left the car in their garage while they went on vacation. The car caught fire - fortunately the garage was sufficiently well sealed that the fire ran out of oxygen before it spread to the rest of the house.
The recall notice for their car was waiting for them at the post office when they returned home.
Damages, etc., were immediately taken care of by their insurance company and ultimately paid for by Ford - as I recall hearing the story this included thorough professional cleaning of rugs and such due to smoke from the fire making it into the rest of the house.
> > "It was, for all intents and purposes, akin to an automobile idling in a driveway with half a tank of gasoline. And then it exploded."
>
> Not entirely unheard of.
I'm also not surprised they didn't push it much publicly. It sounds like trying to deflect blame for your failures.
(The whole idea seems a bit crazy too, there are a thousand things which can go wrong with a rocket, so let's look for snipers.)
If I didn't know any better, I'd say some guy who both roasted his brain with drugs and spends a lot of time in the company of a person who was sniped at is in charge of the company.
He has convinced his shareholders that FSD will ship by the end of every year for the past decade, so why wouldn’t he believe he could convince the FBI that the only way his super fueling process could have gone wrong is via an action movie sniper plot?
It exploding while just sitting there doing nothing narrows the possibilities 99.9%.
Second part - no suppressor I’ve ever seen or used did that, they all did the opposite.
But a flash in the middle of the day would not be very visible anyway.
These are not good signals to be sending when you're trying to get a contract to send a manned mission to space.
The article itself says the theory isn't completely kooky. Quote: This is not as crazy as it sounds, and other engineers at SpaceX aside from Musk entertained the possibility, as some circumstantial evidence to support the notion of an outside actor existed. Most notably, the first rupture in the rocket occurred about 200 feet above the ground, on the side of the vehicle facing the southwest. In this direction, about one mile away, lay a building leased by SpaceX's main competitor in launch, United Launch Alliance. A separate video indicated a flash on the roof of this building, now known as the Spaceflight Processing Operations Center. The timing of this flash matched the interval it would take a projectile to travel from the building to the rocket.
This seems a wildly broad description, doesn't it? What interval, for what projectile?
SpaceX saw a weird coincidence that might be worth investigating. Thats all you need to know.
It's completely kooky, so kooky in fact, there's a (IMHO very funny) sketch about turning business competition into a gunfight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpC_hO15IoA. It's funny because the idea is so absurd.
United Launch Alliance has lawyers. Blowing up your competitor's rocket with a gun would be about the stupidest thing you could possibly do. The upside is low (single rocket launch ruined), the downside is massive (huge civil and criminal penalties). It also suffers from the typical conspiracy theory weakness: everyone involved would need to keep their mouths shut forever, and realistically, at some point someone's gonna have loose lips.
Not commenting on the overall viability of shooting a rocket by competition (it would be stupid IMO), but it's not just a single launch ruined. Launch failure can stop launches/production for months (3-4 months in this case, 5 in the case of the previous SpaceX failure), or even longer if finding the cause of the failure is very hard. A pause in business like that can destroy a company that needs cash. Also, it reduces customers' confidence in the failing rocket, which would be good for the competitor with a flawless record.
Compare that with Boeing's MCAS problems, the plane crashes themselves were less financially damaging than the resulting groundings, production pauses and canceled orders.
It could have been a single person acting alone for whatever reason. Plausibly an employee of ULA who formerly worked at SpaceX and was mad as mistreatment there, or mad they interviewed and didn't get hired, or mad that SpaceX was beating them at whatever and making them look bad or whatever.
Or it could have been a person unaffiliated with ULA who just found a way to access their roof.
History has a handful of pretty significant events that were basically "one guy with a rifle".
Of course they didn't understand what happened right away, in fact, it would have been worrying if they did. What did you expect? Something like: "Oh yeah, it was a leak, it happens sometimes, we just hoped that it wouldn't go boom"?
The focus on the sniper theory is just one of Elon Musk's ramblings. Good thing SpaceX is not just Elon Musk.
They did that too. They didn't only research in one direction.
The reality is that this was a incredibly unique thing that had never been seen before. So it took longer then most investigations.
Such shot would be heard for a mile in quieter conditions. Not joking. Even during distant launch, a perimeter of few 100s of meters of shooter anybody there would hear it clearly.
I never owned or operated seriously any gun, just followed few gun channels + you have all the info on wikis and elsewhere, its just rather basic physics.
Anybody with similar or better knowledge would quickly debunk such theory as bs and focus more on known facts (but we talk about elon's ego here, not the most rational entity, he ie prefers pedophilia accusations when things don't roll as he wants). If they stated some very powerful laser gun, mkay more reasonable but then no visible flashes outside target itself. And such gun would require massive installation, preparation, testing etc.
You don't necessarily need large caliber. .50 cal has a great ballistic coefficient, but bullet design and speed matters a lot too.
6.5 creedmoor and others in the intermediate precision class can all do this as well.
That being said 1 mile is really really long shot, and right where a lot of the lighter calibers start getting near transonic.
Wind is another beast, if it's steady it can be compensated for, but I don't know what the weather was that day... chaotic gusts will wreck a shot for sure.
All that being said, the rocket is a pretty big target, 12 feet across and almost 230 feet high... that's going to compensate for a lot.
Agreed that if you found the piece where the bullet punctured it should be pretty evident what happened. But I don't have any experience doing investigations in this area, and I've heard at least from plane crashes that the fuselage can disintegrate pretty readily in high force scenarios.
I have operated and owned precision rifles, but not big bore, and have not gone out to extreme distances. More fun to play with the math and ballistics.
Would love to hear from someone who knows more than either of us.
Burt Reynolds, and another character (maybe Don Rickles) were guests. Carson couldn't get a word in edgewise. His guests were joking, cutting-up --- very entertaining for the audience to be sure --- but frustrating Carson.
The final guest was Carol Wayne the movie lady. She's the physical manifestation of the dumb-blonde concept. As they spoke, she called Johnny old, tried to explain the graphic symbols used on TV weather reports, and made mention of the fact she was friends with one of Burt's ex-wives.
Burt said something snarky back to Wayne then, partly embarrassed, climbed over the interview couch and briefly hid. He then climbed back over which I'm sure Carson thought uncouth. This was followed by more outbursts from the other guests.
At some point Carson grew tired of Wayne and all the noise. He announced it was time for a TV advert (the ol' clock on the wall!) saying something to the effect of:
"There are days I'd give my bottom dollar just to talk to a regular person. I'm supposed to be the host. When we come back I'll try to make sense of this chaos."
Over the last 10 years I've been feeling Carson's angst more and more viscerally. A sniper? Oh c'mon!