When Spacex suffered his worst incident, Elon Musk blamed a sniper of the competition. The FBI had to intervene

On the morning of September 1, 2016, Spacex suffered one of the most cautious and controversial incidents in its history. A Falcon 9 rocket that was vertical on the launch platform Suddenly exploded With the Israeli satellite A Amos-6 aboard. Elon Musk accused the competition.

A violent explosion. It was one of the first times that Spacex operated the Falcon 9 rocket with cryogenic propelants, a technique that consists in superfrging the fuel and oxidant to maximize its performance.

Before the launch, Spacex had planned a static ignition test, a routine procedure in which engines are tested with the rocket anchored to the platform, but everything was twisted eight minutes before ignition. A violent explosion transformed what was a rocket into a huge fireball. The payload was shot.

Mark Zuckerberg’s anger. The AMOS-6 satellite was not any load. With a cost of 200 million dollars, he had a powerful customer: Mark Zuckerberg. Goal, then Facebook, had reached an agreement to provide Free Internet Access in Africa Thanks to the satellite.

After the explosion, Zuck He publicly expressed A “deep disappointment” for the rocket explosion, comments that did not sit well in Spacex, where morality was on the ground. According to Ars Techcnicathis incident was one of the points of origin of the bad relationship between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, which years later would lead the first to eliminate Spacex and Tesla’s Facebook pages.

The theory of the sniper. The most trospid of the incident was, however, the theory promoted by Elon Musk about the possible intervention of a sniper. Theory in which Spacex insisted throughout the official investigation of the incident, According to documentation that has just become public.

Although Spacex engineers shuffled hundreds of hypotheses, Elon Musk promoted the idea of ​​an external sabotage: the shot of a sniper. It sounds crazy, but Musk saw the two main indications convincing: the break began about 60 meters high, on the side of the rocket that looked towards a building leased by its main competitor, United Launch Alliance.

An alleged ULA shot. The ULA building, a joint business of Boeing and Lockheed Martin, was a kilometer and a half of the Spacex launch platform, a reasonable distance for a sniper. Put to believe, even seemed to see a flash on the roof of the building, coinciding with the time it would take a projectile to reach the rocket.

The rivalry between SpaceX and ULA had then reached its peak. Ul still dominated the market of military and government launches, the most lucrative, but Spacex had just won a battle in the courts to compete for these contracts. However, accusing a sabotage competitor without evidence was a serious accusation.

The FBI came to intervene. Azuzados by Musk, Spacex engineers thoroughly investigated the sniper theory. They tried to access the ULA roof and performed shooting against pressurized helium tanks to see if they exploited similarly to Falcon 9.

The insistence was such that the Federal Aviation Administration had to intervene with a letter that denied the involvement of third parties. There was no sniper, although, as the documentation of the journalist Eric Berger has revealed For your book Recentryeven the FBI investigated the case.

The federal agents reviewed the Spacex analysis and the video material, but they concluded that “there were no indications that suggested that sabotage or any other criminal activity played a role in the explosion of Falcon 9”. With this, FAA considered the closed matter.

What happened then. The real cause of the rocket explosion and, with it, of the AMOS-6 satellite, was the process of loading propellents. In its eagerness to accelerate the refueling process with super -refrained liquid oxygen, the Spacex equipment filled the helium tanks too fast, heating the aluminum coating of the rocket and causing its deformation and rupture.

Spacex would put the hair of Punta to the NASA security office for its procedure “Load and Go”, which proposed to raise astronauts to the rocket before loading fuel. Over time, not only would demonstrate the reliability of Falcon 9 (Last year he completed 137 launches against the five of ULA), but would become the main supplier of NASA manned releases to the International Space Station.

Images | And combinator, Uslaunchreport, CNN Money (YouTube)

In Xataka | Texas has a new city. Until a few days ago, it was only Spacex’s base in Boca Chica