Why is NASA Covering Up Elon Musk’s Mistakes?

On June 28th, 2015, Elon Musk’s SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched a Dragon resupply ship not into space, but rather into the Atlantic Ocean. It was a catastrophic failure that cost taxpayers $112 million. The payload that was meant to resupply the International Space Station (ISS) went up in a huge plume of smoke and flames. However, even though SpaceX did not complete their mission, they still received all but twenty percent of the full payment. Standard NASA protocol is to release a report on every launch accident, but to this day – two years later – there is still no formal statement as to what went wrong on the SpaceX accident.
Per NASA, there won’t be one released anytime soon. The Agency recently announced that it will in fact not publicly release a report on their investigation into the disastrous explosion of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. They had originally committed to reporting their results by the summer of 2017, but have instead passed the buck to the FAA.
‘Since it was an FAA licensed flight, NASA is not required to complete a formal final report or public summary, and has deferred any additional products related to the matter at this time,’ the agency’s Public Affairs Office (PAO) stated. ‘The data is important for historical purposes, but the mishap involved a version of the Falcon 9 rocket, the version 1.1, that is now no longer in use.’ Apparently, the fact that SpaceX is no longer using that version of the Falcon 9 after this $112 million ‘mishap’ of taxpayer funds means the American taxpayers have no right to know what happened. Strangely, that storyline did not work for a competing firm’s similar failure that occurred eight months prior.

This post was published at Ludwig von Mises Institute on September 22, 2017.