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On the morning of 1 September 2016 a SpaceX Falcon-9 rocket carrying an Israeli satellite called Amos-6 exploded three minutes prior to a scheduled static fire test. SpaceX confirmed the event, stating that an anomaly had occurred in the upper stage of the oxygen tank as they were loading propellant into the rocket. The cause is still under review. Also lost during the explosion was the rocket’s payload: the Amos-6 satellite, which was built by Israel Aerospace Industries (an aerospace and defense contractor) and operated by the telecommunications company Spacecom. According to Spacecom’s web site, the new satellite would provide expanded coverage and redundancy in case of other existing satellite malfunction: Facebook had also leased some of the communication equipment on this satellite to support their effort to provide free internet access to large swaths of Africa. After this loss of the satellite, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted a statement: The most widely shared video of the explosion comes from USLaunchReport.com (an NGO that produces video reports of all things space). This video appears to show a rapidly moving object cross above the rocket right before it explodes: https://www.youtube.com/embed/_BgJEXQkjNQThe video does show an object that enters from the right of the screen and passes in a fairly straight line above the rocket (at least from the camera angle) as it explodes. This has led to accusations from some corners of the internet that someone or something of intentionally bringing the rocket down. Some culprits discussed on the original Reddit thread include: aliens, a private aerospace competitor to SpaceX, a government worried about an Israeli spy satellite/weapons system, and/or Facebook’s world domination plans. These claims have been amplified by the conspiracy focused website Neon Nettle and others. What complicates this evidence is that there are a number of other objects, generally reported as birds or bugs, that make similar appearances before (and after) the explosion with far less fanfare. To successfully argue something scandalous, one has to prove that the object can’t be a bird or a bug. Those in favor of an intentional sabotage conspiracy point to three arguments: Unfortunately, the fact that a massive telephoto lens captured the video adds to the challenge, if not outright impossibility of accurately assessing any of these questions scientifically. This camera, based on the time it took the noise of the explosion to reach it (~12 seconds) is easily over two miles away from the pad (assuming sound traveling at 0.2 miles per second). The further the zoom, the more of an effect the lens will have on an object's perceived distance and size. An object closer to the camera, additionally, would be required to travel at a much slower speed to make it from one side of the frame to the other compared to something two miles away. Moreover, YouTube videos such as the uslaunchreport.com video are subjected to lossy compression, an effect resulting in loss of information as well as the introduction of potential artifacts. Per the FBI’s Recommendations and Guidelines for the Use of Digital Image Processing in the Criminal Justice System: This effect is minimal when you are not zooming in; but it becomes a bigger issue when you try to get a level of detail that has already been removed by a compression algorithm. An image treated in this way has been making the rounds as evidence that this object was clearly behind the left-most tower on the launch pad (these towers are used to protect the rocket from lightning strikes): Without more information, it is impossible to know what these pixels are telling us. If the object is in the foreground (and not in the background, as conspiracy theorists suggest) then the issues of the object's apparent larger-than-bird size and faster-than-bug speed can easily be attributed to that fact. The other argument in favor of the object being both distant and fast moving also comes from questionable handling of compressed images. According to some believers, there is a reflected glow off of the object when it passes over the explosion. These images, which also purport to show that the object doesn’t look bird- or bug-like, have been enhanced, by methods that are not plainly documented: It is unclear what processes, outside of inverting the colors, went into the creation of these images; but zooming in on the object in each frame without any enhancement does not appear to reveal much about reflected light or shape: https://www.snopes.com/uploads/2016/09/Screen-Shot-2016-09-07-at-11.32.48-AM.pngA final flaw in the alien/government/evil corporation argument is that it does not explain how an object traveling above the rocket (without making any physical contact) would cause its explosion, nor does it touch on why this novel method might have been employed. Do we know for sure what this object is? No. But the prevalence of similar harmless objects prior to the explosion, the fact that the evidence is based on wishfully enhanced screengrabs of downsampled video, and the fact that rockets are super explosive on their own, make an outside agent low on the list of possible explanations.
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