Elon Musk Became Fixated on the Idea That a Sniper Shot His Rocket, Causing It to Explode

After a Falcon 9 rocket exploded violently and unexpectedly on the launch pad in 2016, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk became suspicious that the cause was something almost unimaginably dramatic: a "sniper" on the roof of a rival's building.

Footage of the event shows the rocket erupting into a gigantic ball of fire in an instant, reducing the mounted Amos-6 Israeli communications satellite into scorched debris.

A Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed with the Federal Aviation Administration by Ars Technica's Eric Berger around two years ago has now revealed that SpaceX engineers thoroughly investigated whether a shooter could've caused the rocket to rupture and explode.

According to Berger, Musk — who was asleep at his home in California when the blast occurred — immediately gravitated toward the theory himself, perhaps giving a glimpse of what's now become his dominantly paranoid worldview.

The space firm investigated whether the round could've been shot by a sniper from the roof of a building — which belonged to rival United Launch Alliance (ULA) — roughly a mile away from the launch pad. Engineers even tried to shoot tanks themselves to see if they could recreate the incident.

And per Berger's FOIA, even the FBI got involved, highlighting the significance of SpaceX's second rocket failure in a little more than a year, around the time when NASA made big investments in the company to establish a new way to deliver its astronauts to the International Space Station.

The incident also underlines how far Musk is willing to go to blame anyone except himself — and his penchant for embracing outlandish conspiracy theories, something for which he has garnered an increasing reputation in recent years.

However, the investigation ultimately concluded that no gunman was involved and that SpaceX had loaded the rocket's pressurized tanks with super-chilled helium too quickly.

Regardless, the timing of the explosion couldn't have been worse. In 2016, SpaceX's rivalry with the ULA, which at the time was launching far more rockets, was extremely heated. Musk sued the US Air Force in April 2014, accusing it of acting anti-competitively and awarding the ULA launch contracts unfairly.

All eyes were on SpaceX, which was furiously working on its Crew Dragon spacecraft. The optics weren't great, with NASA naming four astronauts to its "commercial crew" weeks after the first Falcon 9 explosion in the summer of 2015. The massive blast the following year likely didn't help matters.

To seemingly try to clear his and SpaceX's name, Musk had personally directed the company to make a big fuss out of the since-discredited "sniper" theory.

Nonetheless, even the FBI found "no indications to suggest that sabotage or any other criminal activity played a role in the September 1 Falcon 9 explosion," according to an October 2016 letter obtained by Berger.

In the end SpaceX had the last laugh, though, surpassing the ULA's yearly number of rocket launches in 2017 and becoming the first private company to transport astronauts to the Space Station in 2019.

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