SpaceX says its rocket performed exactly as intended in Zuma launch
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
They're really downplaying how bad their coverage was, it really feels like people love to watch Space X fail. For example:
WSJ Headline: "U.S. Spy Satellite Believed Lost After SpaceX Mission Fails"
TC Headline: "SpaceX apparently lost the classified Zuma payload from latest launch"
So, in this specific case, if it was a failure of the payload to deploy properly, that would almost certainly be Northrup Grumman's "fault".
Many scenarios would point that way, yeah. But there are still things the launch vehicle (LV) could have done wrong. At the end of the day, this is a mechanical and electrical interface. Interfaces must be specified and that always leaves room for misinterpretation or incorrect specifications. There had to have been an electrical harness that signaled when it was time to deploy. A failure there could absolutely be on the LV side.
Elon Musk gives lots of clicks, ergo SpaceX (or Tesla) are also lot of clicks, ergo try to link the story to SpaceX.
(Wouldn't it be great if there was some movement to track and rate the quality of individual journalists and their output?)
So, it seems odd to place the blame on SpaceX given that—according to the only public statements we have—it was a failure of the satellite itself, not a failure of the launch vehicle.
You agree that blaming SpaceX is “sensationalist clickbait nonsense”. Would you also agree that a headline "SpaceX apparently lost the classified ..." is blaming SpaceX? https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/08/spacex-apparently-lost-the...?
I don't like to see SpaceX fail, but I don't like how Elon Musk sometimes appears to try to shift the blame using PR moves...
In this case we have a payload that apparently failed to cleanly separate from the payload adapter (according to a variety of sources). Both the payload and the payload adapter were made by Northrup Grumman, not SpaceX, and the two were mated together by Northrup Grumman, not SpaceX. Do you consider it "blame shifting" to point that out?
The fact that the second stage deorbited when and where it was supposed is just more evidence that the rocket performed as intended.
It’s weird that even your reply seems to assume it’s SpaceX’s fault. Why? (“I don’t like to see SpaceX fail...”)
> [...] it really feels like people love to watch Space X fail.
which is why I said that...
This is an absolute win for SpaceX, despite however anyone wants to spin it. Dramatic headlines about the downfall of the successful sell newspapers, but they don't mean anything real.
I would assume most contracts for space launches involve putting the payload in question into the correct LEO/GEO, or at least an agreed upon point at which the payload maneuvers itself into the intended orbit.
> The booster landed perfectly.
That benefits SpaceX. The customer isn't likely to care what happens to the rocket after it launches their payload.
> There's no damage to the launchpad delaying other rockets.
Not the customer's problem even if it did explode on the pad. That would be between the launch company and the launch facility. In the case of a private customer, the payload is almost always insured (though insurance does little to help with schedule delays in manufacturing a new payload).
> There's no investigation into "what went wrong?" holding back further launches.
There might be for the US military, we don't know.
> No real customer is looking at this and going "Wait, maybe we'd better use ULA instead!" because they know SpaceX launched just fine.
According to SpaceX's account of the launch.
> This is an absolute win for SpaceX, despite however anyone wants to spin it.
Wouldn't an "absolute win" be launching the payload into the intended orbit with no anomalies?
https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/01/what-we-know-and-wha...
> sigh alright so we'll address the fairing deployment here in a second once we have more information
Indicating something might be up. Later he just says
> Quick sidebar, we did get successful confirmation that the fairings did deploy.
So seems like they knew something was up with the payload at that point, but that their telemetry indicated their mission was successful.
As others have noted, it was Northrop Grumman who was responsible for the payload adaptor attaching it to second stage. So unless fairing deployment or the launch damaged the payload/adaptor somehow, SpaceX would have done their part.
Or the host was not cleared to view the fairing separation/payload themselves and had to get their information from others.
I could obviously be misinterpreting it, but this was my impression when watching it live, before we even knew there was an issue with the payload. When I watched it I thought they had lost it until he came back and said fairing deploy was successful.
Seems like the sort of thing you'd HAVE to say about a secret satellite... :-)
The time between launch and strike would be greatly reduced. Space is pretty close to land.
But beyond conspiracy theories, do we know of any confirmed secret satellites? They should be detectable, but on the other hand there are so many satellites that it'd be hard to index them all.
What could you do with a secret satellite? It seems like the signals would be detectable, but I'm not sure.
A secret satellite though? Oh the possibilities! The big problem with satellite surveillance is that people can figure out where your bird is, and simply you know... avoid it. Granted you can't hide large buildings, but you can predict when it will fly over and hide your troop numbers, mobile launch systems, etc.
How do you avoid a satellite you have no tracking data on? Of course, that would require some really impressive optical, radar, and thermal stealth tech, but that's quite plausible.
Of course if you were really paranoid, then maybe you'd think this isn't a satellite, but a satellite killer. I doubt it, and there are proven options to kill satellites from the ground, but it's possible.
my understanding is that many space vessels use micro-reactors for power.
Couldn't you just use plutonium warheads so that they look like one of those?
Legally speaking, 0, since the Outer Space Treaty forbids placing nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction in orbit, and all spacefaring nations so far have signed. Even if the military kept things under wraps, I'm not so sure that stationing nukes in orbit would provide a significant advantage, as you would only be able to strike a particular target when it rotates under your orbit, which means you can hit a target only twice a day at fairly specific times, while ICBMs can be launched at any time. In addition, modern ICBMs have flight times on the order of 30 minutes ([0], [1]), so satellites aren't going to be reaching a target much faster.
Edit: forgot to address another point
>They should be detectable, but on the other hand there are so many satellites that it'd be hard to index them all.
We already track more than half a million pieces of space debris, with 20,000 of those larger than a softball ([2]), so I'd imagine a "secret" satellite wouldn't stay secret for long.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intercontinental_ballistic_missile#Flight_phases
[1]: https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/12028/is-it-correct-that-it-takes-approx-30-minutes-for-an-icbm-to-reach-russia
[2]: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/news/orbital_debris.htmlSigning treaties didn't stop us from waterboarding torture.
> Even if the military kept things under wraps, I'm not so sure that stationing nukes in orbit would provide a significant advantage, as you would only be able to strike a particular target when it rotates under your orbit, which means you can hit a target only twice a day at fairly specific times, while ICBMs can be launched at any time.
The big benefit would be that a target can be wiped off the map without a giant "LOOK WE DID IT" flag immediately beforehand.
> We already track more than half a million pieces of space debris, with 20,000 of those larger than a softball ([2]), so I'd imagine a "secret" satellite wouldn't stay secret for long.
Space debris follows a predictable track once spotted and isn't deliberately constructed to be hard to find with visual/radar observation. This is a bit like saying stealth bombers are impossible because we can easily spot airliners.
Isn't that because the US called waterboarding "enhanced interrogation" instead of torture, and therefore could claim that they were following the letter of the law?
In any case, the "legally speaking" was intended to mean "it can still happen, but there's probably going to be a lot of fallout if someone finds out".
>The big benefit would be that a target can be wiped off the map without a giant "LOOK WE DID IT" flag immediately beforehand.
That's an interesting point. Only way I can think of to figure out whose nuke it is is to extrapolate the reentry vehicles' trajectory backwards and see what satellites are in possible source orbits. That's not going to be very accurate, I think. Wonder if there is a better defense against that.
>Space debris follows a predictable track once spotted and isn't deliberately constructed to be hard to find with visual/radar observation. This is a bit like saying stealth bombers are impossible because we can easily spot airliners.
Good point. I had considered the possibility of stealth tech, but I guess I didn't really think that hard about what it meant until I read that analogy.
What you're describing is closer to a spy camera in a geosynchronous orbit. A LEO nuke would not behave like this.
I was thinking of a polar orbit when I wrote that comment. You'll always be over the same longitude with a geosynchronous orbit, as opposed to passing over any longitude. You have more flexibility in targeting locations that are mostly below you, though.
>A LEO nuke would not behave like this.
Why not? The orbit stays the same, while the Earth rotates under it. A particular point on the Earth will rotate under the orbit 0-2 times a day, depending on inclination.
...and since you have to be moving faster to hit geosynchronous orbit, you have to have a lot more ΔV to get back to the earth than if you were in a lower orbit, which means more fuel, which means more weight, which means harder to get into that orbit to start with...
Oh, and since you're still moving when you're doing that ΔV maneuver, you'll end up in a lower (and not-geosynchronous) orbit before you get all the way to the planet, so the payload would probably end up doing a few orbits on its way down anyhow (at which point, why care if you're "over the target")
> You can't just fire a rocket "straight down" -- if you just point at the Earth and thrust, you end up in an elongated orbit that misses the earth entirely.
The second sentence doesn't justify the first. You can thrust in various directions even if your intended trajectory is straight down. I surmise you would simply need to reduce orbit speed to maintain the same angular velocity the whole way down, which doesn't strike me as a computationally or physically difficult problem.
Yeah, I know pointing straight down is a horribly inefficient way to deorbit; if anything, it probably requires more delta-v than you expended getting up there in the first place. I was more thinking that with something in geosynchronous orbit, small-ish changes in whatever velocity you end up in after the deorbiting burn could result in very different targets on the ground, whereas in LEO you can't cover the same amount of ground under your orbit with the same delta-v (or at least I think; haven't actually done the numbers, if I even knew how). Still requires a heck of a lot more fuel if you just want to get from LEO to the ground, as you pointed out.
> Oh, and since you're still moving when you're doing that ΔV maneuver, you'll end up in a lower (and not-geosynchronous) orbit before you get all the way to the planet, so the payload would probably end up doing a few orbits on its way down anyhow (at which point, why care if you're "over the target")
If the deorbit burn provides enough delta-v, you can fall straight from geosynchronous altitude to Earth without being stuck doing a few orbits. And the not-geosynchronous orbit is actually what I expected. You want the Earth to rotate, since that might move the point under the geosynchronous satellite approximately under the point the nuke would reenter the atmosphere. I don't know whether an orbit with the right period exists though.
This scenario might make an interesting book or movie plot, but I have never heard of one. Spy novel with nukes.
I don't know what it's called but I love when something is nicknamed for the antithesis of what it's meant to do: guns/nukes -- killing people. Peacemaker? You be the judge... [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colt_Single_Action_Army
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction
So far nukes have kept the great nations out of war, but the possible Black Swan event of a large nuclear exchange is a doozy.
If a disembodied hand comes out of nowhere and slaps you, you may have difficulty proving it was me that did it, especially if the hand vaporizes in the process.
Then there are all the other disadvantages of orbital nukes. They can only strike on their orbital path, and only when they're in the right point of the orbit, otherwise they're very expensive to re-target because it means changing orbits. Because of all those points they're actually a lot slower to target than ICMBs. If they're in a low orbit then the orbit will decay and they will come down in a few years whether you want them to or not. If they're in a high orbit the costs are even higher and they're even slower to target. Finally, they're vulnerable to detection if they're up for any length of time. They really are a terrible idea.
Plausible deniability goes a long way, even if it's not very plausible. Plenty of cases in the Cold War where everyone knew a side did something they shouldn't have but couldn't prove it.
Chaff's handy for making it look like the launcher had an issue, but you need something else for ongoing evasion.
And you can use it to make popcorn.
Your question is equivalent to "what are the chances we have more than 1 nuke in orbit." Is that what you meant?
The failure, apparently, is that they can't contact the payload, not that it disappeared.
That's not really surprising; I'd imagine most long-term satellites carry thrusters and at least some amount of fuel for stationkeeping, especially in geostationary orbit. It'd definitely make it much more difficult to track, unless you keep something pointed at it 24/7 so you notice the change in velocity.
And nice find with the SBIR competition! Does seem to point towards satellites being much more difficult to track than I thought if they're constantly moving.
My explanation of choice as of today is that NG launched a refueling (dockable) sat to a previously launched spysat.
If you are an American that was your money. It's not good to simply burn it up.
I tend to believe this is just misinformation until someone finds some hard evidence otherwise.
SpaceX says their rocket did its job. Northrup Grumman hasn't said sanything.
F9 S2 deorbited as expected. S2 got to orbit. Thus the payload got to orbit too.
However, the government tends not to buy insurance. For an entity as big as the US government, insurance will surely be a net loss when you add up all of the times they would want to buy it. For instance federal employees don't buy any of the insurance offered with rental cars. Obviously with the number of federal rentals, there are lots of accidents that the government must pay for, but this figure is lower than total cost of all the insurance they would have to pay for to avoid it.
In general insurance is only advisable if the avoided costs would be too much for the insured to pay out of pocket. And the federal government can essentially pay for anything.
That's not even mentioning specific concerns with this highly classified payload. The insurance company would want some knowledge of what they are insuring to assess its value and that's just unnecessary risk to the secrecy.
Media says Zuma didn't make orbit.
SpaceX says everything worked the way it should have.
I think the flaw is in the second-guessers assuming the mission was to make orbit, and not to test some kind of (laser?) anti-rocket/satellite technology.
TechCrunch specifically called it out as a Space X failure:
"SpaceX apparently lost the classified Zuma payload from latest launch"
And in the story under that headline:
"The satellite was likely worth billions, according to the WSJ, which makes this the second billion-dollar plus payload that SpaceX has lost in just over two years; the last was Facebook’s internet satellite, which was destroyed when the Falcon 9 it was supposed to launch on exploded during preflight preparations in September 2016.
This could be a significant setback for SpaceX, since these kinds of contracts can be especially lucrative, and it faces fierce competition from existing launch provider ULA, jointly operated by Boeing and Lockheed Martin."
> WSJ: U.S. Spy Satellite Believed Lost After SpaceX Mission Fails
The SpaceX mission didn't fail if it checked all the boxes it was responsible for.