NOT AN IMPOSSIBLE SHOT: SpaceX pushed “sniper” theory with the feds far more than is publicly known.

As part of my book on the Falcon 9 and Dragon years at SpaceX, Reentry, I reported deeply on the loss of the Amos-6 mission. In the weeks afterward, the greatest mystery was what had precipitated the accident. It was understood that a pressurized helium tank inside the upper stage had ruptured. But why? No major parts on the rocket were moving at the time of the failure. 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.

This failure gave rise to one of the oddest—but also strangely compelling—stories of the 2010s in spaceflight. And we’re still learning new things today.

The lack of a concrete explanation for the failure led SpaceX engineers to pursue hundreds of theories. One was the possibility that an outside “sniper” had shot the rocket. This theory appealed to SpaceX founder Elon Musk, who was asleep at his home in California when the rocket exploded. Within hours of hearing about the failure, Musk gravitated toward the simple answer of a projectile being shot through the rocket.

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.

The FBI investigated, but with the FAA concluded there was no gunman.