For some context:
The same Boeing satellite bus already experienced a major issue some years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19658800
replies(3):
The same Boeing satellite bus already experienced a major issue some years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19658800
ID Name Orbit Incl.
98050A ASTRA 2A 57.2 4.93
09017A WGS F2 (USA 204) 57.5 0.01
14023B KAZSAT-3 58.5 0.02
12008A BEIDOU-2 G5 58.7 2.10
16053B INTELSAT 33E (IS-33E) 60.0 0.04 <-- 20+ debris components
19014A WGS 10 (USA 291) 60.3 0.01
04007A ABS-4 (MOBISAT-1) 61.0 3.86
10008A EWS-G2 (GOES 15) 61.5 0.04
19049B INTELSAT 39 (IS-39) 62.0 0.02
Yeah, the satellite disintegrates and they call it an "anomaly" and "unlikely that the satellite will be recoverable". This response is even funnier than "the front fell off" sketch.
I feel like it's time to class Boeing as not only inept but a dangerously inept organisation.
Note that that's in the sense of angular separation, as viewed from the ground. They're physically hundreds of kilometers apart.
edit: (Geostationary orbits are ~42,000 km from the Earth center-of-mass; each degree of angle is an arc of ~700 km).
So something similar might have happened here.
1. Collision with other debris
2. Internal fault causing uncontrolled release of stored energy (i.e., explosion)
Intelsat-29e used the same satellite bus and experienced #2, in the form of some sort of uncontrolled propellant release.
Can anyone tell whether (at 60 degrees East and at 4:30 UTC October 19) the satellite was passing through the intersection with the main plane of lunar perturbed debris? This would hint at a possible debris strike.
Sadly I can't seem to find a 3D satellite visualization that lets you go back in time. :-(
[1] https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2008/03/Spacecraft...
On human timescales, it's basically forever. Hopefully we'll develop the tech to clean up debris in space, but it's extra challenging to do it in geostationary orbit since it's so far away from Earth, both in terms of actual distance, and delta-V.
> People worry about LEO constellations causing Kessler syndrome, but the reality is that LEO debris deorbits in the order of months/years.
It's a little more complicated than that. The time to spontaneously deorbit is based on orbital height. Starlink can deorbit on its own in 5-10 years because it's orbiting so low. But any OneWeb satellites that malfunction[1] will take 1000+ years to deorbit because they're up at 1000+ km.
---
1. Like this one
https://spacenews.com/oneweb-mulls-debris-removal-service-fo...
People warned about exactly what happened already back in the time when the merger happened that introduced beancounter culture to Boeing.
The problem was, as always, no one listens to the warners and the whiners when there is money to be made.
It's had a few propulsion system issues:
> On 9 September 2016, Intelsat announced that due to a malfunction in the LEROS-1c primary thruster, it would require more time for orbit rising ...
> In August 2017, another propulsion issue appeared, leading to larger-than-expected propellant usage to control the satellite attitude during the north/south station keeping maneuvers. This issue reduced the orbital life-time by about 3.5 years.
But these satellites also carry fuel for orbit keeping, evasion manoeuvres and going to a graveyard orbit at its end of life. Given that this satellite had two separate propulsion issues and Intelsat-29e suffered from electrostatic discharge it's not difficult to imagine the satellite igniting its fuel in an uncontrolled manner
[1] https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2024-03/news/us-warns-new-ru...
That's a pretty specific flaw to then just write it off to a meteor.
So they are 0 for 2. Does not instill confidence in this "next generation" at all.
But it's such a massive clusterfuck for Boeing that it seems like MBA programs should be reformed from the ground up.
From Wikipedia, it looks like it's a USSF satellite launched in 2019 with a service life of 14 years. It provides wideband communications to DoD customers.
Highly optimized systems are fragile. They work well so long as everything stays the same. Optimizing for cost will compromise other things. Quality is not a varnish to be applied after you make something, it's designed into the product and production process from the beginning - by people who understand such things.
As if it wasn't the result of what has been taught for decades, now coming of age more bigly than ever ;)
>MBA programs should be reformed from the ground up.
Who would do the reforming though?
Academic leaders? That could be like having the inmates running the asylum :)
From the ground up?
If you're not careful they could end up building an insane new institution at a massive scale in an image grandiose enough that it could crush GE or something ;)
If you have a 25 m^2 cross section in the direction of the explosion, at that distance you have a roughly 1 in 246 billion chance of any given bit of debris hitting you.
It still is a 1/1,000,000,000 chance, maybe less.
But some debris (in particular slower pieces) will probably oscillate around the geostationary orbit giving it countless chances of hitting other satellites.
Has someone modelled this for example in Kerbal space program?
And no, I'm not an MBA . . .
When calculating risk, you have to take into account how many are there and what is the chance that any will be hit. Then you have to calculate what's the chance this will happen again, etc - and only then you can calculate the risk to your own satellite.
It's true that the chance of getting hit by one broken satellite is small. But that assumes there are exactly 2 things on the orbit.
Do you have an idea of what would be the failure mode(s)?
At least of the bigger debris.
The underlying defect is a system which allows absolutely poor performers to advance based on an overwhelming focus on greed and ambition for power.
When it has become more popularly acceptable to allow it to become so.
The most unsuitable candidates for leading people are what the mainstream finds acceptable or even desirable once the culture shift swings this far.
With either a reduced number of key positions that can afford to be occupied by a dud (or worse), or an increased number of limited-ability competitors prevailing on the basis of their dedication to leveraging greed and even treachery, the kind of leader that's really needed is less likely to advance from entry-level at all.
What would really help would be a culture that inhibits those unsuitable individuals from arising toward those limited number of key positions to begin with.
Disclaimer: this comes from playing a self-made orbital mechanics game, I have no training whatsoever let alone professional experience with this
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_flux
Almost all of the debris will have orbits which intersect their orbit of origin.
What’s with the missing insurance? Didn’t they get any insurance because of the previous debacle with a Intelsat where they couldn’t decide if it was a internal or external source? Who would pay now if debris causes damage?
Interesting to see the Space Force now mentioned and following the Wikipedia list[1] the standard procedure seem to be to create a new agency every couple of decades which takes over the previous one but with a new name. What are the reasons for this?
Edit: [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_space_forces,_units,...
Source?
Rendezvousing is pretty established tech so long as you know a precise and stable orbit of your target, afaik? Which, for geo, we would I think. So taking up some grabbing mechanism probably does it, then use ion engines, burning retrograde (avoiding the need for heavy fuel) until you get it to a low LEO orbit, let loose, and let the problem solve itself within a few ~weeks. Then move on to the next piece, so you don't need a launch to orbit for every individual piece of debris. You also don't have to circularise your orbit to just rendezvous and grab it. And you probably also don't have to go out of plane even if the target object is, if I'm visualising this correctly, because there's always a node where the planes intersect and you can just start the path up to geo at the right point in your LEO orbit
Grossly simplified, devil in the details, but this seems very possible with today's technology and potentially less expensive in terms of delta V than it may seem at first glance
Ironically, SpaceX is probably one of the least bad companies in that regard.
1. They launch satellites to a very low LEO orbit. The satellites use their onboard thrusters to get to their final orbits. This means that satellites that malfunction early in their life (the first lip of the bathtub[1]) deorbit in a matter of months. And they're so low, they don't affect anyone else.
2. And even Starlink satellites that do fail are at such a low orbital height that they'll spontaneously deorbit in 5-10 years.
---
If sales/marketing runs the restaurant it's full but there is no food. The menu is beautiful and shows all kinds of dishes nobody knows how to make.
If MBAs run the restaurant it's full of people paid to be there long enough to be counted and reported up to the investors and the food is purchased from the McDonalds next door and relabeled and resold at 3X the price. Nobody will ever come back but it doesn't matter. The metrics from this exercise are used to raise money to open three more restaurants across the street from convenient sources of cheap fast food. This novel model of running restaurants is written up in Harvard Business Review as an excellent example of an arbitrage business model.
If artists run the restaurant they make and eat the food themselves and then leave.
$ units
You have: 25m2 / 2tau(700km)^2
You want: /billion
* 0.0040600751
/ 246.30086The parent comment explained some reasonable contractual mechanisms for civil remedy - insurance etc.
Speeding up doesn't raise the orbit; it makes it (more) elliptical while still intersecting with the old orbit (shared with neighbouring satellites)- you need at least 2 maneuvers to raise an orbit. You're also assuming a perfectly pro-grade acceleration. In an explosion, different pieces go in different directions, I suspect there is a vector that results in faster speed in the same orbit, but I'm no rocket scientist.
Here's an article about that: https://skyandtelescope.org/observing/how-to-see-and-photogr...
There are commercial services that keep visual track of geostationary satellites. A couple of years ago, IIRC, a Russian satellite broke down and there were pictures of the disintegration.
Is it a "standard operating procedure" if there are only two examples of it happening (and independent space forces in general)?
In any case, even for those that still aren't fully independent, it seems to be slowly separating air and space forces as space became a bigger player in the global arms race.
Why do these announcements have to be so hedgy? The satellite is in twenty pieces, I'd think that with the probability of spontaneous reconstruction being so low, we're fairly safe to say "will not be recoverable".
Meanwhile Airbus R&D engineers in Toulouse and Hamburg are often less than a 5 minute walk from where their designs are being manufactured.
The fact that orbital speeds are faster than explosions took a bit to sink in.
I assumed basic reading comprehension, my bad.
Also, I don't play by your rules but keep trying.
This could be a Boeing problem but it also could be due to an impact with a micrometeorite or other natural-origin space debris.
Enjoy the meteor shower if you have a chance.
My interest is piqued!
I certainly enjoy reading some of these theories, even if the professionals in the hot seat disagree with their take.
This is something of a dichotomy between engineering-based structures and sales-centric, with MBA's and designers as collateral players.
Everybody needs sales of some kind, but most businesses do not actually need "engineering", so there are not usually any engineers expected to in the chain-of-command. Even in an engineering company itself there may be only token members in the most critical decision-making positions.
A sales hierarchy sells from a select source of technology.
An engineering hierarchy selects a technology to be a source of.
They each have huge pallettes to choose from, but they are different.
I think many lifelong business operators are aware that it really takes far more years to truly learn their business than it would to enroll as a freshman and end up earning an MBA.
And that's not even engineering companies.
These are the kind of organizations that may have no worthwhile use for even the most talented decision-maker of any kind regardless of degree, until after their employment has been lengthy enough to have achieved the working acumen that is really necessary. In many cases taking far more years on active duty than in academic preparation, but it's worth it.
But even if you can do without MBA's forever, you still have to have Production, Sales, accountants, HR, Admin, security, IT, etc. You can only go so far with "engineers" only.
However, in one way to approach an ideal "engineering company" the entire chain-of-command consists of true technical leaders-by-consensus top-to-bottom in a Maslow-like way where by nature less consensus is needed toward the top where the individual vision finally becomes most powerful.
All the other departments report to this engineering backbone in one way or another so the buck always stops with somebody who can handle the engineering calculus and who always puts that kind of thing foremost from day one, without undue reliance on business calculus, which are two different pursuits to an extent.
Then if a gifted MBA or two have something to offer, they can do so while reporting to the appropriate engineers, never the other way around.
You need to get back to a more technically talented chain-of-command where they instinctively can make way more money through technology than any bean-counters would ever be able to save even if they laid everyone off.
No doubt you can accomplish a lot by having a completely non-technical chain-of-command, with engineering off to the side like other essentials such as accounting or HR. People do it all the time. But you can't really accomplish quite the same things after all.
Still it sounds like any customers who stumbled in to the "Engineering Restaurant" end up with the best as far as the food itself, although there is some "Artisan Dining" where the experience can be unforgettable too.
Sometimes you don't get much on your plate though, I wondered if they were in the back eating most of it themselves ;)
Okay, so it's functionally impossible with the current and likely next incoming US administration.
And yes, malfunction is the most likely cause, distantly followed by attack. Micrometeoroid isn't very likely IMO, considering Intelsat-29e failed similarly. Unless maybe if they painted a red target on it and the meteor god has a sense of humor.
Personally I used basic high school geometry knowledge of "what's the area of a sphere", and you could also have just asked WolframAlpha, which also predates LLMs.
History of On-orbit Satellite Fragmentations, 16th Edition
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20220019160/downloads/HO...
Searching that PDF for "geostationary" I found:
"The Russian government’s disclosure of the Ekran 2 battery explosion on 25 June 1978 is the first known fragmentation in geostationary orbit."
There are two other geostationary fragmentations in the list, Ekran 4 and Ekran 9. These two events are hypothesized to have also been due to battery explosions.
Might be a valuable lesson in "reading the question carefully" for them, though, as the scenario was: "That’s pretty close when your neighbor just exploded", which is why orbital mechanics can be disregarded in this instance.