SpaceX

SpaceX pursued the sniper theory for more than a month. A few SpaceX employees told me that they did not stop this line of inquiry until the Federal Aviation Administration sent the company a letter definitively saying that there was no gunman involved. It would be interesting to see this letter, so I submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the FAA in the spring of 2023. Because the federal FOIA process moves slowly, I did not expect to receive a response in time for the book. But it was worth a try anyway.

No reply came in 2023 or early 2024, when the final version of my book was due to my editor. Reentry was published last September, and still nothing. However, last week, to my great surprise and delight, I got a response from the FAA. It was the very letter I requested, sent from the FAA to Tim Hughes, the general counsel of SpaceX, on October 13, 2016. And yes, the letter says there was no gunman involved.

However, there were other things I did not know—namely, that the FBI had also investigated the incident.