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Comment by ballooney | Hacker News Reader

Note additionally it's being reported that the secondary payload on this flight, an Orbcomm sat, did not get deployed into the correct orbit because the Falcon upper stage insertion burn failed. No info on whether or not this was a related failure. Info at the moment just seems to be social networks, can't find anything more solid: https://www.facebook.com/jsrpage/posts/10151048911726680

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Bad Astronomy [1] has a comment saying the Orbcomm satellite is a test unit (not the production unit yet) and that a second-choice orbit is possibly where it will be released.

[1] http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2012/10/08/sp...

I read it as that they have already deployed rather than will be. But yes, the comment seems to suggest that the idea of trying to put it into the nominal orbit was abandoned, the speculating being that the 2nd stage had to burn for longer to get the dragon/ISS primary payload as it should be, and so not leaving enough fuel left over for the secondary payload nominal insertion. That sounds plausible, but equally SpaceX haven't said anything so it's all just armchair speculation, which is fun anyway.

Just for the record, since this topic is getting old as these things go, the upper stage insertion burn didn't happen because the longer burns of the first two stages wouldn't allow it without it getting to close to the Space Station, which has very wide margins for safety (i.e. as far as they know the burn could have happened, they didn't try). Sounds like a bet on a cheaper flight that didn't pay off for Orbcomm, although it remains to be seen if they can get any use out of the satellite.

Spaceflightnow.com has some more details:

http://spaceflightnow.com/falcon9/004/121008orbcomm/

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