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Interesting comments about this on reddit, namely: > If SpaceX had ANY and I mean ANY suspicion of foul play they would have called the FBI. The company is not
by knowaveragejoe 10y ago
Interesting comments about this on reddit, namely:
> If SpaceX had ANY and I mean ANY suspicion of foul play they would have called the FBI. The company is not stupid enough to potentially contaminate criminal evidence by running their own investigation along that line. So IF SpaceX was thinking along those lines. It would be the FBI requesting access to the roof.
As such I think foul play can be safely removed from the list of possibilities. This is likely just the case of an employee not thinking though the potential PR headache the request would cause.
https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/55at14/spacex_asked_to_look_at_ula_roof_which_has_field/ https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/55at14/spacex_asked...
- bane 10y agoThe Air Force has a Federal level law enforcement agency that is likely the agency involved in the investigation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Air_Force_Office_of_Special_Investigations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Air_Force_Office...
- downandout 10y agoAgreed. SpaceX may well have called the FBI at first, who likely would have called in the Air Force, seeing as how they have the expertise in this sort of thing. The FBI was probably involved from day 1, since there are quite a few possible criminal subplots going on here (terrorism - state sponsored or otherwise, sabotage by competitors, etc).
- BWStearns 10y agoWhere would one gain expertise in spaceship sabotage? I've worked with people with strange specialties but that would be a new one. Joking aside you're definitely right that fbi and air force investigators were looped in day 1.
- rm_-rf_slash 10y agoJoke un-aside, if you can make it, you can break it. Anyone with enough education and determination could sabotage a spaceship. It's like how the Soviet Union's well-educated computer scientists became capitalist Russia'a taxpaying hackers.
- slimsag 10y agosounds interesting, anywhere i can read more about it?
- Iv 10y agoIf you suspect criminal foulplay, you call the FBI. If you suspect blackops by a foreign government, you call the CIA. And they may keep quiet about it. I like how Stratfor's leaked glossary presented the FBI: "Federal Bureau of Investigation, aka the Downtown Gang. Very good a breaking up used car rings. Kind of confused on anything more complicated. Fun to jerk with. Not fun when they jerk back."
- maxerickson 10y agoIt used to be that the CIA had no authority to run operations inside the US. Has that changed? Do they routinely ignore their lack of authority at the request of private entities?
- emp_zealoth 10y agoLoopholes, duh
- andyidsinga 10y agoI just watch Sicario last night - pretty good movie actually - a central element to the story is how they operate in US borders.
- maxerickson 10y agoIs it based on official documents obtained from the CIA? Or is it a made up story?
- sprafa 10y agomade up but plausible. A large part of the plot is how they need to work with local agents so they are not "technically" CIA. They are working in some way as consultants in a very dangerous operation.
- abysmallyideal 10y agoThey operated agents in the US disguised as a variety of laborers and professions during the red scare, both posing as communist/socialist organizers as well as patrons. It was estimated many communist and socialist organizations received a majority of their donations from undercover fbi and CIA agents. In many cases, their meetups were almost all undercover agents.
- h4nkoslo 10y agoIn fairness, the FBI are political actors. They'd be the last people I'd call if I suspected I was being screwed by Boeing and Lockheed, of all people.
- qume 10y agoBingo
- jt2190 10y agoCounter argument: I was at a talk given by an FBI agent to a group of system administrators in 2004. The agent urged us to do our own investigating.. audit logs, sniff packets, etc. The reasoning was that our servers and networks were our private property and we could do as we pleased, whereas the FBI is bound by law to seek warrants and be very careful not to violate anyone's rights. (The bulk of the talk was about computer forensics.)
- JumpCrisscross 10y agoUntil presented with extraordinary evidence, the default assumption should be that this was an unacceptable mistake. Distracting from their sleepless-engineering culture with "sabotage" is unlikely to be fruitful (but worth exhausting in preliminary investigation).
- jblow 10y agoGee I guess all those times the US space program had things explode were 'unacceptable mistakes' to you as well.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- JumpCrisscross 10y agoThe strut event (in fact, every previous SpaceX failure) was acceptable. Failure on the pad during integration testing, like this, is not.
- jblow 10y agoDude what are you TALKING about. Astronauts have even died during rehearsal events that were not real launches! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1
- erklik 10y agoI think i read this in another thread here on HN and it applies to this situation quite well too ( imo ). Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity ( I would like to swap stupidity with accident but the gist is the same ) or Don't assume bad intentions over neglect and misunderstanding. - Hanlon's Razor