Posted on 01/08/2018 7:10:37 PM PST by bkopto
An expensive, highly classified U.S. spy satellite is presumed to be a total loss after it failed to reach orbit atop a Space Exploration Technologies Corp. rocket on Sunday, according to industry and government officials.
Lawmakers and congressional staffers from the Senate and the House have been briefed about the botched mission, some of the officials said. The secret payload—code-named Zuma and launched from Florida on board a Falcon 9 rocket—is believed to have plummeted back into the atmosphere, they said, because it didn’t separate as planned from the upper part of the rocket.
Once the engine powering the rocket’s expendable second stage stops firing, whatever it is carrying is supposed to separate and proceed on its own trajectory. If a satellite isn’t set free at the right time or is damaged upon release, it can be dragged back toward earth.
The lack of details about what occurred means that some possible alternate sequence of events other than a failed separation may have been the culprit.
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
It is unlikely that they would fake a failure while having one of their operative let all of us know it was really a success.
There are over 1600 comments on the YouTube “ZUMA Mission” launch page - none (in the 1st few pages) mention a failure. Some audacious person did ask a few minutes ago if the payload deployed properly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PWu3BRxn60
Given the re-use (ie., “new” technologies) being added in, that 93% success rate sounds very good to me.
Yup. The poster I was replying to seemed to think it was 50%. Apparently he missed all the Falcon 9 launches that were successful.
SpaceX says there were NO anomalies with the rocket.
Possible rumor tweeted:
"(3/5) so if anything went wrong at all (which so far are rumours only, and they need not be true at all), it is either with #Zuma being successfully deployed but dead on orbit, or not detaching from the Falcon 9 upper stage."
Some are convinced that Zuma is in orbit, others that it reentered and burned up.
Another tweet (last entry):
"Note that NORAD has now reserved only 1 object from this launch - 43098/2018-001A which was labelled as "USA-280". 43099-43101 have been given to objects from the Chinese launch a few hours ago.
Now, for the similar launches of NROL-76 & OTV-5 (2nd stage de-orbited), the catalog shows 2 objects from each launch, one labelled as the payload and the other as Falcon 9 Rocket Body....."
SpaceX is pleased with the launch - meaning that whatever happened was NOT due to their systems. Northrup is not commenting as usual on its classified payloads or dispositions. If any one is paying insurance money it will likely be to Northrup, not SpaceX
It will be up to others to see if USA 280, aka Zuma, is really in orbit or not.
Lots of pictures of the rocket during launch, flight and landing
If Musk’s booster performed its portion of the mission profile then how can the US Gov’t refuse to pay his company? According to the report, the upper stage failed. Is the upper stage a SpaceX product of is it part of the payload? It would make a difference.
The Falcon was able to return to its launchpad safely so its all good.
Not to mention there is no supply-chain for the components, major & minor, that would go into a Saturn V’s F-1 engine. Most of the companies no longer exist or were absorbed in takeovers and the workforce that engineered & built them is dead & buried.
Any piece of technology is essentially an artifact like you might find in an archaeological dig. It is a byproduct of a process that no longer exists.
From over on Reddit:
https://www.celestrak.com/satcat/search.asp
Enter 43098 in the Norad Catalog Number, and this comes up:
USA 280 (ZUMA) Launch Date 2018/1/8 Launch Site AFETR Status +
AFETR is Air Force Eastern Test Range, Florida, USA
A “+” status indicates “operational”.
“Great flaming Wolf spiders!!!”
Leave the gay spiders out of this you homophobe. :-)
That article is pure propaganda. Falcon has had almost as many failures as it has had attempts.
Shuttle had 2 major failures out of about 140 launches. You seem to be challenged mathematically.
Wolves are homosexuals?
You learn something new around here every day.
Never mind that (a) those factories long ago were repurposed or closed down; (b) we don't build cars the way they were built in 1957; and (c) you wouldn't even be allowed to sell new '57 Chevys today because they had no pollution controls and were lacking many safety features.
Despite that, we know plenty about how a '57 Chevy works and even much of how they were designed and built.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_and_Falcon_Heavy_launches
“Since the first mission in June 2010, rockets from the Falcon 9 family of launch vehicles have been launched 47 times, as of 8 January 2018. Out of these, 44 missions were successful, with the status of the most recent currently unknown (but reported lost), one mission was destroyed in flight, and one mission placed its primary payload in the correct orbit but failed to deliver a secondary, experimental payload. Additionally, one rocket exploded on the launch pad in a pre-flight test.”
You seem to be the one mathematically challenged here.
It’s odd that you’d pick the example of a ‘57 Chevy. Our machine shop supervisor builds street-legal cars that you can compete at the drag strip with. I forget exactly how we got on the subject, but I think we were discussing crate-engines, and he just happened to say, “the ‘55-7 Chevy is probably the car that you can build totally from purchased parts. But of course, there would be allowances for regulatory & technological changes. It would be a replica.
At your own provided link, they list 12 failures. 3 if you only want to count the launch portion. But a misleading statement of 44 out of 47 successes with 12 failures listed. Someone is mathematically challenged.
They are getting better with experience, but they still cant compete with the success rates of ULA vehicles. And when you are carrying 100 to 500 million dollar payloads, its foolish to bet on lesser odds. Like I asked yesterday, is Musk going to pay back the taxpayer for his loss? No, he is not even going to admit it was his responsibility to have a working second stage and integrate the payload with an adaptor that worked. He is going to point fingers which he has already started doing.
That someone would be you.
Your direct quote: “Falcon has had almost as many failures as it has had attempts.”
If that were even half true, they would have had to have 23 failures. They don’t. 23 > 12.
The industry only counts launch failures in their reliability numbers, and using the same metric for Falcon as is used for Delta and Atlas, it was still 93% prior to this last one. By that metric, they would have to have had 22 launch failures. They had three. 23 > 3.
Again, the math challenged person here is you, Mister “Falcon has failed almost as many times as it’s had attempts.”
I don’t want to sit and argue pointless arguments. You also stated the shuttle failure rate was 40%. Maybe, like the shuttle, Musk’s failures seem worse because when he has them they are so SPECTACULAR.
Musk is an entrepreneur of the worst type. He built his fortune on tax payers and govt handouts when govt cronies like Clinton and Obama were looking for ways to weaken critical US industries and line their own pockets with campaign kick backs. So I am admittedly biased against Musk, not because he levels a playing field, which he does not, but because he claims he is doing as well as the rest of the industry for less when, in fact, he has a govt handout advantage, and gets a handicap.
Man rated vehicles must have success rates exceeding 99%. Most insurers for satellites (using non-man rated launchers) want success rates in the mid to high nineties to insure, or the insurance will cost as much as the launch.
US govt launches are self insured unless they write the contract to force the loss on the system integrator. In that case the contractor would have to get their own insurance and not take payment from the govt.
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