I'm also not surprised they didn't push it much publicly. It sounds like trying to deflect blame for your failures.
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".
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.
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.
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.
But a flash in the middle of the day would not be very visible anyway.
(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.)
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?
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.
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.