Possibility of Sabotage Considered During SpaceX Investigation
Implication of sabotage adds intrigue to SpaceX investigation, Washington Post
“The long-running feud between Elon Musk’s space company and its fierce competitor United Launch Alliance took a bizarre twist this month when a SpaceX employee visited its facilities at Cape Canaveral, Fla., and asked for access to the roof of one of ULA’s buildings. … The building, which had been used to refurbish rocket motors known as the SMARF, is just more than a mile away from the launchpad and has a clear line of sight to it. A representative from ULA ultimately denied the SpaceX employee access to the roof and instead called Air Force investigators, who inspected the roof and didn’t find anything connecting it to the rocket explosion, the officials said.”
Well let’s spin the conspiracy wheel again and note that the WashPost is owned by … Bezos!
Must be a slow news day.
Really. You’re going to go there?
A good conspiracy theory, like a good April Fool’s Day joke, needs to become gradually weirder and more implausible as it goes on. Until the audience finally realizes someone’s stringing them along as a practical joke.
Seriously, I’m going for a slow news day and an investigation which wants to reply to conspiracy theories by honestly saying, “no, we checked, and nothing like that happened.”
I remember when one of SpaceX’s rockets failed to land at sea, there were rumors of sabotage. It seems unlikely, but I wouldn’t rule it out.
Nice use of Gary Seven.
Excellent choice of image! I just watched that one not too long ago 🙂
And his cat, Isis!
No. Just stop. No. No. No.
Dear God people. Take off and put down your tin foil hats and step out of fantasy land.
It would be a lot easier to dismiss this out of hand if we didn’t already have one example of Boeing Behaving Badly to keep its EELV alive.
“An internal Air Force memo suggests a broad pattern of improprieties by Boeing Co. when it bid on Pentagon contracts, apparently contradicting the aerospace giant’s assertions that such problems were isolated and that it corrected them quickly.
According to the memo, Boeing misled federal investigators and lied about the number of documents that Boeing employees stole from rival Lockheed Martin Corp. to win a lucrative rocket contract.”
-LA Times, Apr 23, 2004
But yes, I agree this is very unlikely to have been the result of sabotage.
Twelve years after this story, and more since the incidents involved – and hundreds of millions in fines and lost sales later – makes this line of thinking specious; the leadership at Boeing from back then are long gone and as I noted elsewhere, Boeing has bought Falcon 9 rockets for commercial customers.
Having watched ULA try to cut SpaceX’s legs our from under it for many years in any number of ways, I’m less willing to dismiss this outright than I once might have been.
When there are billions at stake, as with ULA’s launch business, ethics tend to go out the window. Just ask Wells Fargo or Deutche Bank how business is conducted these days.
Let’s just assume that for the sake of argument that ULA (and by extension some of its employees) are skeezy enough to want to do this. The people involved in the scheme would also have to be willing to place themselves in serious legal jeopardy for the sake of ULA’s bottom line. And before you point to the behavior of other Wells Fargo or other misbehaving corporations, remember that this wouldn’t be some white-collar regulation flaunting that gets resolved with a corporate payout, this would be some serious terrorism s**t, investigated and prosecuted by the FBI. Presumably, based on the the article, we are talking about some sabotage-from-afar, such as a 60 caliber sniper rifle, which would probably be up to the task in both range and damage (if you know where to shoot). Perpetrators of this vile deed would not only need to worry about being exposed by the widespread video and audio coverage of the rocket, they would also need to worry about incriminating debris, and most worrysome of all, the prospect of failure. In that case the rocket might be left completely intact, aside from the bullet holes. Given the quality of video coverage, even failing on just the first shot might provide overwhelming evidence, conspiracies like this play out much better on Alias than they do in real life. Which is more likely, A: ULA’s deeply amoral but bold administrators employ steely-eyed ninjas, or B: SpaceX suffered a COPV failure several flights into the switch to supercooled LOX.
I agree. This is why conspiracy theories aren’t convincing. They involve some plot or scheme with an uncertain chance of success and massive repercussions for the conspirators if it either fails or succeeds but they get caught. The idea that someone would be both competent enough to pull off such a scheme and stupid enough to try is, in my opinion, very hard to believe. There are cases where something similar has actually happened (Pearl Harbor and 9/11 come to mind.) Conspiracy theorists can point to them to deny the inherent implausibility of their claims. But conspiracy theories are implausible enough that it would take tons of supporting evidence to convince me. Just saying someone had a motive and that it might be possible doesn’t do it.
I loves me some conspiracies as much as the next guy.
But I didn’t see any discussion of weapons in the WaPo piece, although I would point out that 2000 yards is all in a day’s work for today’s snipers, who have a very wide variety of projectiles to use, some of which leave nearly no debris. silly, yes. Impossible, nope.
But isn’t it simply prudent to examine such a perch?
I don’t recall seeing any claim that ULA did it.
The facts seem rather uninteresting in this case. An unexplained shadow and momentary light source from the ULA building was noticed in the footage analyzed by the incident investigation team. This sort of lead HAS to be tracked down. This isn’t lazy 1960’s policing where the investigation stops on the first suspect considered. The investigation team MUST track down every other lead, at least far enough to determine these explanations to be sufficiently implausible.
The thing the investigator was probably looking for was just some deployed equipment, or traces of it, which hadn’t shown up on available aerial photographs which would be responsible for the shadown and maybe the light source too.
The possibilty of sabotage is probably <0.1%
Maybe ULA put one of these on their rooftops:
http://breakingdefense.com/…
…just kidding.
Wait. Washington Post which is owned by Bezos runs an article about Blue Origins’ partner ULA sabotaging SpaceX.
Get your tinfoil hats out!!
In all seriousness though, the notion that this could be sabotage is ludicrous. I know that SpaceX have tweeted about getting audio-photo or videos from the public about this. I also know that Elon has tweeted that they have not ruled out an external factor yet.
But, that does not mean they think there was sabotage, or that a sabotage was likely. They simply HAVE to investigate every lead on the fault tree, and it is rather upsetting that this simple fact leads to conspiracy speculation.. T_T
Btw, here is a great blog post by Wayne Hale regarding accident investigations.
https://waynehale.wordpress…
I didn’t see where ULA was responsible, just something from one of their buildings seemed abnormal and they wanted to run it to ground.
What’s to keep someone from posing as a ULA or support employee to gain access to the roof?
Very unlikely but then ULA certainly has very strong motive to want to see Space-X rockets blow up, after all for many years they have had a very nice little thing going with their nigh on $1bn annual subsidy for pretty much doing nothing and with every successful Space-X launch this looks increasingly in jeopardy. The odds that someone at ULA would stoop quite so stupidly low are remote to say the least but certainly not zero.
Although I don’t subscribe to the sabotage theory, lets not forget there could be other motivations for sabotage besides commercial competition. The payload was an Israeli satellite and there are a lot of Israel haters in the world.
Yes indeed, that’s another consideration, and perhaps in reality a slightly more likely scenario for those who subscribe to the sabotage theory.
Just for the record: If ULA did somehow sabotage that vehicle, I’d hope desperately that they weren’t so flat-footedly stupid to do it from the top of one of their own facilities.
My guess about the flash of light was it was light catching the lens of a camera one ULA employee was using to film the static fire. Possibly corporate espionage of some minor sort if you want to be paranoid but not sabotage.
IMHO, the only viable sabotage vectors would be:
1) Someone somewhere along the line deliberately interfering with the component that failed so explosively;
2) Someone flying a small drone into the side of the rocket with the intent of sparking off the GOX venting off of the vehicle during tanking.
Option 2 would be clumsy and have only a tiny chance of success. Option 1 would carry enormous risk of being discovered during the pre-flight process.
I love the pic used for this story, a notable style by Keith and Marc using images from fictional stories (hmmm, suggests this sabotage is simply a fictional rumor?).
I think if ULA wants to “sabotage” SpaceX it would be in forms of manipulating contracts, leaking business information, etc. Not physical means (which are great for movies) like drones, planting explosives, snipers, or as in the ST episode of a highly skilled person with a powerful pen and a feline companion that can get to a launch vehicle with nobody noticing.
ULA is already working your list. And more.
As long as they are going down every possible rabbit hole, why mot also consider that some overtaxed SpaceX employee – maybe someone also working on Mars Colonies – made a mistake during the tanking operation or that a disgruntled employee might be sabotaging the rocket. Are these likely? No but no more so than speculating that ULA might be involved.
Because of course Boeing has never been caught breaking law when it comes to their business.
Well, while they have had a few procurement violations – not sabotage of competitors – those were a decade or more ago. Additionally, Boeing has sold satellites to commercial customers and launched them on Falcon 9 rockets – if they are that committed to SpaceX’s failure, why would they do that?
I fear your tin hat may be on a bit too tight; the easy explanation – sabotage – is almost certainly wrong and the more painful answer (for SpaceX); namely a design or quality control flaw is almost certainly what happened.
I agree but 70 billion is something that could tempt some rough crazy man in order to insure their job
$70B is not the profit at stake nor could one rough crazy man possibly benefit from such an incident. Boeing is a corporation with about $100B in annual revenue; even if you assume EELV is $70B in Revenues over a decade, that is probably less than $10B in profit, split 50/50 with the other ULA co-owner, LM. So you are assuming that a company with $1T+ in revenues over this time frame will commit a major felony so that its profits – paid to several million shareholders – goes up by .005% of its decadal revenues – does that really seem like much of a motive?
Boeing employees, in the past, have acted and been charged, for independent actions taken to benefit their employer, Boeing.
Oh for gods sake, that was 18 years ago!
This is not Stark Industries’ arch enemy!
it is pointed out that “sniper” wasn’t mentioned in the WaPo article. But with an audible ‘bang’ potentially just before the explosion, the explosion being apparently instant, during refueling which is extremely rare, SpaceX specifically noting the bang and asking the public for recordings to help triangulate, a shadow followed by a bright spot specifically on the roof of a competitor, SpaceX asking access to the roof but being denied followed by an Air Force inspection…we in the public can’t be blamed for wondering about the obvious possibility that comes to mind. Even if it doesn’t turn out to be a sniper, there’s enough smoke to warrant looking into it.
The SMARF is owned by ULA? I tried finding some background but wasn’t successful. It does have an excellent view from the top 🙂 and I doubt it’s guarded. No way on the sabotage, but they should try to figure everything out. Kind of interesting I guess. Good on everyone that the Air Force checked out the site.
Honestly I’ve been surprised at how well rocket companies and related parties can identify the failure points in these failures.
A sniper on the ULA rooftop seems unlikely, but I don’t think we can rule out sharks with laser beams attached to their heads
https://www.youtube.com/wat…
I am reminded of the Shakespeare play, the King moans and sighs oh if only someone could rid me of these troubles, knowing that there are many underlings that would rid the king of his troubles and grant him plausible deniability.
Shakespeare? Did he write about Henry II?