Don Your Tinfoil Hats

January 9, 2018 12:58 AM

Did or did not the classified Zuma satellite survive launch?
posted by Literaryhero (48 comments total)

Did. Or did not. There is no tried.
posted by fairmettle at 2:25 AM on January 9, 2018

I can neither confirm nor deny the deployment of the satellite. That's classified.

Yes, ma'am, I am from the government. Glad to help.
posted by Samizdata at 2:48 AM on January 9, 2018 [2 favorites]

There are a few good /r/spaceX discussions on this subject (1, 2, 3). Among the choicer theories:

Given how hush-hush Zuma was coming up the manifest, all the secrecy surrounding the Satellite, and the fact that the customer wants no one to know what the hell Zuma is even more so than usual, it stands to reason to me that the satellite being "Lost" is exactly what they want everyone to think while it fires up its engine and goes and shifts it's orbit by a large amount so it conveniently gets lost again then gets on with it's nefarious mission.

...

From here on in I doubt there would be any more heard about Zuma, lost or otherwise. What we will be able to tell though is whether or not SpaceX was responsible IF it actually was lost because flights will stop until the issue is resolved and/or the classified military launches will dry up. If they keep flying and winning contracts all good, if they stop flying for a bit then there was an issue with the upper stage.

posted by adrianhon at 2:57 AM on January 9, 2018 [7 favorites]

I like that second one. Sufficiently sensible, IMO.

(Now, if Elon could figure out why I need to use the edit tool so much, I would be REALLY impressed.
posted by Samizdata at 3:01 AM on January 9, 2018 [1 favorite]

Elon Musk needs to stop joking about building a volcano fortress because this looks suspiciously like the plot of You Only Live Twice.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 3:03 AM on January 9, 2018 [21 favorites]

> justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow:
"Elon Musk needs to stop joking about building a volcano fortress because this looks suspiciously like the plot of You Only Live Twice."

He's already got a finger in the tunnelling pie...

[starts looking around for his copy of Evil Genius as he feels an urge to reinstall...]
posted by Samizdata at 3:14 AM on January 9, 2018 [2 favorites]

I don't know if this is related, but when I was using my new telescope last night -- thanks, Santa! -- I swear I saw a red Tesla tumble through Orion.
posted by pracowity at 3:39 AM on January 9, 2018 [5 favorites]

Elon is def a space alien/android trying to get home.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 4:05 AM on January 9, 2018 [4 favorites]

Wait, what? I had no idea that it still existed, much less that... oh, sorry, I read that as Zima. Never mind.
posted by Halloween Jack at 4:27 AM on January 9, 2018 [14 favorites]

The rocket performed correctly. The satellite did not deploy. Hence the adapter, the thing meant to deploy the satellite, failed. I mean, I think the whole thing is uber-creepy, but there isn't actually a contradiction in the reports.
posted by Zarkonnen at 4:38 AM on January 9, 2018 [3 favorites]

Secret or not, if I was SpaceX and incorrect rumors were floating that my rocket had failed, I would be super, duper pissed off. Either 1) SpaceX was at fault, 2) there will be a clarification that SpaceX was not at fault, or 3) SpaceX is getting paid a fuckton of money not to care.

Honestly I'm just worried about what the hell they sent up. "Spy satellite" isn't that controversial anymore. "Rods from god" or "Nuclear deterrent in orbit", on the other hand: welp.

The super extra paranoid take that I'm not seeing anywhere is that another space power shot it down, in which case: double welp.
posted by phooky at 5:19 AM on January 9, 2018

I think I found it. Take a look at this image I captured through my telescope.
posted by Rock Steady at 5:34 AM on January 9, 2018 [21 favorites]

Did or did not the classified Zuma satellite survive launch?

Yes.
posted by runcifex at 5:36 AM on January 9, 2018 [7 favorites]

Things like that drive me out of my mind.
posted by davebush at 6:00 AM on January 9, 2018 [9 favorites]

There are tons of amateurs that track satellites and publicly comment upon the same. Secret spy satellites don't hide for more than a couple of weeks.

They'll see a new one if it's up there.
posted by Xyanthilous P. Harrierstick at 6:07 AM on January 9, 2018 [6 favorites]

Zuma little zoom in a rocket ship.
Off we go, on a trip.
Headin' for the moon at a rocket clip.
We're gonna zoom-zoom rock it.
posted by rlk at 6:14 AM on January 9, 2018

Trying to find anything about Zuma is notoriously difficult. Zuma tends to be adjacent to a lot of work, but rarely if ever seems to be the focus. I hesitate to think that racism is at fault here, but the more I think about it, the more I suspect that might be the case. Everything that Zuma does tends to be undermined by the rest of the Paw Patrol - he's the water dog, dammit, so why do the other pups get water going versions of their vehicles? Why can't Zuma be the focus of an episode? Is it because he's the darkest dog? Chase and Marshall eat up most of the screen time leaving Zuma, Skye, Rocky, and Rubble to pick up the pieces. Because the Powers That Be love to pander to the white working class, we get a few bones (literally) tossed Rocky and Rubble's way, leaving Zuma and Skye, the representations of minorities and women to battle it out for attention. They are deliberately trying to drive a wedge between two disenfranchised groups here! Ryder, the Elon Musk of this scenario, does nothing but offer new technology to the dogs, but of course it's the police state dogs, Chase and Marshall, who benefit the most. They have drones and medical care facilities - the rest get nothing.
posted by robocop is bleeding at 6:20 AM on January 9, 2018 [24 favorites]

"Spy satellite" isn't that controversial anymore.

It can be controversial as hell depending on what it is, and what orbit it's in, because of what that implies about who and/or what you're spying on. "Spy satellites" aren't generic pieces of equipment; they're highly specialized to specific missions (providing early warning of rocket launches, tracking ships, visual reconnaissance, etc.) and knowing even general information about them can provide clues to their capabilities. (E.g. the Soviet RORSATs were designed to track US carrier groups via radar and are designed totally differently from the US optical reconnaissance satellites, which look like miniature Hubble Space Telescopes, just pointing the wrong way.)

Plus, of course, there's the issue that treating every mission as super-secret is the only way to avoid leaking information when you do want to do something that's even more controversial than usual; otherwise there'd be a sort of "warrant canary" type effect where the lack of information about a particular mission would be telling.

If I were running NGA, every once in a while I'd launch a weather satellite or something totally innocuous and make it seem like the blackest of black ops just to fuck with the other side insert some noise into the system.
posted by Kadin2048 at 6:26 AM on January 9, 2018 [5 favorites]

[Dons tinfoil hat as instructed]

[Hat falls apart from being worn almost continuously over the last fifteen months]

[Crawls into a fridge]
posted by CynicalKnight at 6:27 AM on January 9, 2018 [23 favorites]

"Spy satellite" isn't that controversial anymore. "Rods from god" or "Nuclear deterrent in orbit", on the other hand: welp.

Oh, the USA has yet another way to kill us all. I'm so disturbed. Umm, stick it in the pile, I suppose.
posted by pompomtom at 6:37 AM on January 9, 2018

Also, prelaunching a satellite full of tungsten rods seems like a sexy idea, but satellites are pretty vulnerable. They also have very predictable orbits, making a surprise attack with a system like that difficult.

The "kill anyone, anywhere, on a moment's notice" system is called Prompt Global Strike and it basically involves taking a bunch of surplus ICBMs, removing the nukes, putting a conventional precision-guided package in its place (plus some tungsten, or concrete, or whatever for ballast), and then keeping it nice and warm and safe in its silo in North Dakota or Arkansas (or under the ocean) until you really want to ruin somebody's day, and then sending it up on a suborbital ballistic path, which in some cases is faster than shifting the orbit of a LEO satellite.

If you want to spend a bit more, you take the nuclear RV and replace it with a smaller kinetic weapon and take the extra throw weight and put a little upper stage on it, such that you can just get from a ballistic trajectory into fractional orbits, which means you can hit anyone from any angle. The Soviets played with this with heavy throw ICBMs and big nukes, so it's not a huge stretch.

The downside is that launching a system like that looks suspiciously like launching an actual nuke, although I'm not sure why you couldn't mitigate that with inspection regimes. (I mean, a B-52 is a perfectly fine nuclear launch platform, too, and nobody gets too torqued up about them.) But that's the stated reason why it doesn't exist. Personally, I think it's more because the US already has the ability to kill anyone pretty much anywhere on short notice through other types of force projection, and making that ability cheaper, i.e. within reach of the Chinese and the Russians given their lower defense budgets, isn't really to our advantage. Keeping the table stakes high is a good thing when you're the high roller.

Anyway, the idea of having weapons in space is attractive due to a perception of it being the ultimate "high ground", but it's really not where you want to have your high-value capabilities sitting. Unless you were going to build a GPS-like constellation of deadly-egg-dropper satellites, such that you could have one basically overhead at any time (not a bad totalitarian-global-overlord dystopia scenario), there are cheaper ways of getting to the same capability, as well as existing conventional methods that favor dominant global players and don't rock the boat.
posted by Kadin2048 at 6:59 AM on January 9, 2018 [8 favorites]

The downside is that launching a system like that looks suspiciously like launching an actual nuke,--Kadin2048

Considering both the US and Russia have systems in place that look for pre-emptive strikes and can trigger a process that starts a global thermonuclear war, I'd say that this is about the biggest downside in all human history.

although I'm not sure why you couldn't mitigate that with inspection regimes
The chance of global thermonuclear war is not something you 'mitigate'. It is something you take every possible measure to eliminate entirely. I really hope no one is seriously considering making the launching of ballistic missiles a normal activity.
posted by eye of newt at 8:00 AM on January 9, 2018 [1 favorite]

SpaceX says its rocket performed exactly as intended in Zuma launch

The article contains a quote from SpaceX president and COO Gwynne Shotwell:

For clarity: after review of all data to date, Falcon 9 did everything correctly on Sunday night. If we or others find otherwise based on further review, we will report it immediately. Information published that is contrary to this statement is categorically false. Due to the classified nature of the payload, no further comment is possible.

Since the data reviewed so far indicates that no design, operational or other changes are needed, we do not anticipate any impact on the upcoming launch schedule. Falcon Heavy has been rolled out to launchpad LC-39A for a static fire later this week, to be followed shortly thereafter by its maiden flight. We are also preparing for an F9 launch for SES and the Luxembourg Government from SLC-40 in three weeks.

posted by fremen at 8:19 AM on January 9, 2018 [5 favorites]

To summarize some of the more knowledgeable and well-sourced information from r/spacex and the nasaspaceflight forum:

Independent observations from the ground provide evidence that the fairings detached on schedule and the upper stage reached orbit. As is standard, the upper stage performed a deorbit burn after 1.5 orbits to burn up over the pre-declared hazard zone in the Southern Indian Ocean.

The payload was supposed to detach from the upper stage just after it reached orbit. So either the payload did not detach, they went ahead with the deorbit burn knowing that (this is potentially a complicated decision - the upper stage can't delay indefinitely or the fuel will freeze), and the payload burned up on reentry - or the payload detached but is dead and floating in orbit. We should be able to determine which case happened by observations of whether there is an object still in that orbit - Space-Track had an entry logged but it might have been the upper stage on its first orbit.
posted by allegedly at 8:37 AM on January 9, 2018

Things like that drive me out of my mind

Yeah, I watched it for a little while



I love to watch things on TV
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 8:38 AM on January 9, 2018 [8 favorites]

So either the customer-provided adapter didn't deploy and SpaceX is saying "we did our job it's the secret customer who messed up" or the plan was always to pretend the adapter didn't deploy to secretly launch the satellite but they're realizing that pulling that move with a private company who cares about their public image isn't easy to stomach. And now SpaceX is backpedaling because pretending to fail for a secret customer doesn't help the company get future business after all.
posted by thecjm at 8:54 AM on January 9, 2018 [3 favorites]

Honestly, launch failures of any kind get so much attention that it's hard to imagine any spy agency deciding to go with a fake failure story - especially with SpaceX having a live webcast and so much media coverage.
posted by allegedly at 9:05 AM on January 9, 2018 [1 favorite]

Guys the soccer moms put up the Zumba sattelite to further their agenda of pants suit mind control, it sends microwave signals that make vulnerable boys drink soy. It's all a lesbian communist space witch conspiracy.
posted by idiopath at 9:05 AM on January 9, 2018 [6 favorites]

Wait, what? I had no idea that it still existed, much less that... oh, sorry, I read that as Zima. Never mind.

Zima never failed to launch....in projectile vomit form out of the yawning mouth of some poor imbiber.
posted by Liquidwolf at 9:19 AM on January 9, 2018 [1 favorite]

> Honestly, launch failures of any kind get so much attention that it's hard to imagine any spy agency deciding to go with a fake failure story - especially with SpaceX having a live webcast and so much media coverage.

Not to mention the various national and international organizations actively tracking all the man-made objects in space, who will be doing their damnedest to verify whether something was added to earth orbit the other day and are going to be rather indifferent towards somebody else's desires to keep it a secret.
posted by ardgedee at 9:31 AM on January 9, 2018 [2 favorites]

Well this looks like a fishing expedition to me. I know the satellite was built probably before the election, doesn't it take some time to accomplish these things? So maybe this satellite is actually a good kind of thing that the current admins, wouldn't want. If it is something that helps our ships find their butts, with two hands, in the dark, that would be good. I know nothing about these matters, but it is classified, no one is talking. That is what we paid for. Same as uptown, in any state.
posted by Oyéah at 9:44 AM on January 9, 2018 [1 favorite]

Whatever it was, I'm sure it cost the equivalent of 25,000 homeless shelters.
posted by Beholder at 9:45 AM on January 9, 2018 [5 favorites]

I swear I saw a red Tesla tumble through Orion.

It wasn't red - it was on fire - and it wasn't through Orion, it was off the shoulder.
posted by Pogo_Fuzzybutt at 9:54 AM on January 9, 2018 [7 favorites]

Cover story covers. If it is Space X's fault it will suspend the launch and we will know. I bet it is up there operational.
posted by Ironmouth at 11:03 AM on January 9, 2018

The downside is that launching a system like that looks suspiciously like launching an actual nuke, although I'm not sure why you couldn't mitigate that with inspection regimes. (I mean, a B-52 is a perfectly fine nuclear launch platform, too, and nobody gets too torqued up about them.)

One reason is that you might have hours of warning for a B-52 strike, which gives lots of time to double check your radars, give someone a jingle on the hotline, etc. Whereas If you think you see ICBMs, you may have less than 10 minutes to decide whether to launch your own nukes. Not a lot of margin for error for the most stressful, consequential decision ever to be made.
posted by jjwiseman at 12:55 PM on January 9, 2018 [3 favorites]

There are tons of amateurs that track satellites and publicly comment upon the same. Secret spy satellites don't hide for more than a couple of weeks.

If Zuma is really still operational, it wouldn't be the first time there was some question over whether a spy satellite had been lost on launch, and then was spotted by amateurs. USA 53, a "Misty"-class with rumored stealth capabilities, went missing soon after launch. Some pieces were seen, and the Soviets (weirdly) claimed it blew up. The USAF was vague about its status. Six months later, amateur observers found it. (Wired has a good article, "I Spy", in which one of the amateurs who spotted it hypothesizes that the military actually programmed the satellite to go into stealth mode whenever it flew over his location.)

More info is available at https://fas.org/spp/military/program/track/stealth.pdf, which I reproduce here both to fight linkrot and because it's a great, weird story:

The Saga of USA 53 - Found, Lost, Found Again and Lost Again
------------------------------------------------------------
Satellite sleuths will recall space shuttle mission STS 36, which deployed a secret CIA/Air Force satellite named USA 53 (90019B, 20516) on March 1, 1990. Aviation Week reported it to be a large digital imaging reconnaissance satellite. Members of an observation network which I organized, observed the satellite between the 2nd and 4th of March. It was deployed into a 62 deg inclination, 254 km altitude orbit. Early on March 3rd, it manoeuvred to a 271 km altitude. Observers noted that the object was extremely bright, reaching a visual magnitude of -1 under favourable conditions. Its brightness was similar to that of the very large KH-9 and KH-11 imaging reconnaissance satellites.

On March 16th, the Soviet news media reported that several large pieces of debris from the satellite had been detected in orbit on March 7th, and suggested that it had exploded. In response to Western media enquiries, the Pentagon stated that "hardware elements from the successful mission of STS 36 would decay over the next six weeks". As expected, the Air Force statement was vague about the status of USA 53. The debris could have been from a break-up of the satellite, or simply incidental debris. Only five pieces of debris were ever catalogued. An intensive search by observers in late March failed to locate the satellite. Six months later, the mystery of USA 53 was solved, through the efforts of three European observers. On October 19th, 1990, I received a message from Russell Eberst, stating that he, along with Pierre Neirinck and Daniel Karcher had found an object in a 65 deg inclination, 811 km altitude orbit, which did not match the orbit of any known payload, rocket body or piece of debris. He suspected that the object could be a secret U.S. payload, and asked me to try and identify it.

There are many secret U.S. objects in orbit, however, initial orbital elements, released in accordance with a United Nations treaty, are available for most of them. Most objects could be easily ruled out on the basis of orbital inclination. There remained three recent high inclination launches for which the U.N. had not yet received elements, and three satellites in near 65 deg inc orbits which had been tracked for a short time by observers, then lost after they manoeuvred. I found an excellent match with one of the latter, USA 53. There were no close matches with any of the other objects. My analysis revealed that the orbital plane of the mystery object was almost exactly coplanar with USA 53 on March 7, 1990, the same date that the Soviets found debris from USA 53 in orbit! This is a strong indication that the object in question actually is USA 53, now in a new orbit. The debris may have been connected with the manoeuvres to the new orbit.

USA 53 was successfully tracked by observers until early November 1990, when it manoeuvred once more. The orbit was raised slightly on or about Nov 2nd, which is reflected in the most current elements. Bad weather prevented further observation attempts until 7 November, by which time, the object had made a much more significant manoeuvre, and could no longer be found. So far, all attempts to once again locate USA 53 have failed. The following are its last known elements:

USA 53 18.0 4.0 0.0 4.1
1 20516U 90019 B 90309.99079700 -.00002298 00000-0 -95528-3 0 03
2 20516 65.0200 194.0588 0009734 214.9671 144.9440 14.26241038 04

posted by jjwiseman at 1:07 PM on January 9, 2018 [8 favorites]

In my opinion, there's little motive to hide a spy satellite in LEO, where everyone knows we have a ton of them already, and where the orbits pass over everywhere within a certain latitude band so you can't even tell who in particular is being spied on. The exact orbits aren't published, because need-to-know, but the satellites get found by amateurs anyway.

So to make a fake failure worthwhile, we would have to be talking about not just a spy satellite, but a stealth satellite, and that would be just crazy.

Except... it's not so crazy that we haven't been trying to do it since the dawn of the Space Age. (see that first PDF link to a collection of relevant documents dating back to 1954)

And even the coincidence of a super-secret stealthy spy satellite "malfunctioning" after reaching orbit isn't new:

"But within weeks after MISTY's shuttle deployment, both U.S. and Soviet sources reported that the satellite malfunctioned. Richelson explained that a spacecraft explosion "may have been a tactic to deceive those monitoring the satellite or may have been the result of the jettisoning of operational debris.""

On preview: jjwiseman *just* beat me...
posted by roystgnr at 1:12 PM on January 9, 2018 [2 favorites]

> ...which I reproduce here both to fight linkrot...

archive.org has it, dunno if you need more redundancy than that.
posted by ardgedee at 1:38 PM on January 9, 2018

It's all a lesbian communist space witch conspiracy.

Just curious, but... theoretically, where would someone find, say, a coven of lesbian communist space witches? I'm asking for a friend, because that sounds totally terrible and not appealing at all.
posted by loquacious at 2:31 PM on January 9, 2018 [3 favorites]

In my opinion, there's little motive to hide a spy satellite in LEO

And after more reading, I stand corrected. It's impossible for a LEO satellite to sync up with a particular ground target, but if they're again trying to use satellites to do close observations of other satellites, then there may be good reason to hide the observer's location and even existence.

There's also good motive for trying to hide some military ground recon satellites: if WW3 ever starts then anything in a known orbit is likely to be trashed in the opening salvo, and having something survive would be incredibly important.

Oh, and as long as I'm adding corrections to an old thread, I might as well correct someone besides myself:

the US optical reconnaissance satellites, which look like miniature Hubble Space Telescopes

There's probably nothing miniature about some of them:

In January 2011 NRO offered NASA two space optical systems with 2.4 m diameter primary mirrors, similar to the Hubble Space Telescope, yet with steerable secondary mirrors and shorter focal length resulting in a wider field of view. These could either be spare hardware from the KH-11 program, or optics from the cancelled FIA program.
...
It is believed to resemble the Hubble Space Telescope in size and shape, as the satellites were shipped in similar containers. Furthermore, a NASA history of the Hubble, in discussing the reasons for switching from a 3-meter main mirror to a 2.4-meter design, states: "In addition, changing to a 2.4-meter mirror would lessen fabrication costs by using manufacturing technologies developed for military spy satellites." A CIA history states that the primary mirror on the first KH-11s measured 2.34 meters, but sizes increased in later versions.

World astronomy got 1 Hubble-sized space telescope, in 1990, and IIRC won't get a bigger one until next year. US espionage got sixteen of them, starting in 1976.
posted by roystgnr at 2:41 PM on January 9, 2018 [5 favorites]

Wait, I thought it was commonly accepted knowledge that the Hubble was just a surplus KH-11 they retrofitted with astronomy-specific CCDs, filters and guidance.

Everything I've heard about Hubble is that they're essentially the same core satellite bus/airframe and it goes a lot farther than sharing the same sized mirror and optics.

You know what would be amazing? To live in a world where all of those spy satellites were just space based astronomical telescopes. Could you imagine 16 Hubble Space Telescopes all working together as a very large diameter interferometer telescope?

Could you imagine a network of optical, interferometer telescopes with a baseline spread over the entire diameter of Earth orbit?

We could be looking at high resolution optical/hybrid imagery of black holes right now. Or direct imaging of planets around other stars. Something like this would make the Hubble look like a child's toy.
posted by loquacious at 3:30 PM on January 9, 2018 [6 favorites]

In my opinion, there's little motive to hide a spy satellite in LEO, where everyone knows we have a ton of them already, and where the orbits pass over everywhere within a certain latitude band so you can't even tell who in particular is being spied on.

If you can hide a recon satellite, so that people can't tell what its orbital parameters are, then it will be harder for adversaries to schedule their Sekrit Thangs at times when US birds aren't overhead.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 3:52 PM on January 9, 2018 [3 favorites]

Secret spy satellites don't hide for more than a couple of weeks.

It would be very hard to spot a bunch of stealthed microsatellites. Big satellites are shiny so they don't overheat, but a sufficiently small satellite could be matte black and still lose heat by radiation. Put a microsatellite into a funny-shaped shell and give it a small ion drive. It looks like a piece of debris - if it can be seen at all - but it can gradually change its trajectory to intersect any orbit at almost any speed you like. Voila, you have an almost invisible (but eminently deniable anyway) satellite killer.
posted by Joe in Australia at 12:59 AM on January 10, 2018

> Voila, you have an almost invisible (but eminently deniable anyway) satellite killer.

That's not really a thing anybody wants to do, though (where "anybody" means the people with authority to decide what goes into space, because obviously there are a lot of people with a multitude of bad ideas). Space debris is tracked because evading collisions is expensive and accidental collisions are very expensive and cause cascades of increasing orbital debris. It's less like killing somebody with a bullet and they stop moving. More like killing somebody with a bullet and their body emitting random bullets that can hit other people who, if they die, etc. The 99 Percent Invisible podcast did a good episode on this a year and a half ago (link contains a good text summary of the podcast).
posted by ardgedee at 6:37 AM on January 10, 2018 [1 favorite]

So if the payload failed to separate (yes, I'm starting to wear my tinfoil hat now), then both payload and second stage got deorbited together.

And it looks like the post-deorbit-burn fuel dump came after the usual one and a half orbits.

So we had a multi-billion-dollar satellite in space, all that needed to happen was for it to separate from the second stage and then mission accomplished, and yet everybody literally spent no more than 2 hours trying to diagnose and solve or work around the problem?

That's surprisingly not implausible. SpaceX just lets GTO second stage orbits decay naturally, but they do a controlled deorbit of whatever they can, which would probably be an extra-good idea for a second stage with a heavy satellite still attached. If they wanted to deorbit into the predeclared south Indian Ocean hazard zone, then their options were "do it on schedule" or "do it a whole day later (declaring a new hazard window) and pray the second stage is still fine on power and temperature and ullage gas and everything after that delay". The SpaceX second stage is supposed to be able to restart after 5 or 6 hours in space (so they can do complete GSO launches with Falcon Heavy, not just the more standard GTO) but I don't know if it can last 24.

I wonder if the South Atlantic (or if it could last that long, South Pacific) would have been acceptable backup locations for deorbit? How fast can a hazard zone be approved and declared? There's a "spacecraft cemetery" in the middle of nowhere in the South Pacific, but it's not obvious that this particular launch could have made it there, since it wouldn't even come anywhere near for the better part of a day.
posted by roystgnr at 11:27 AM on January 10, 2018 [1 favorite]

It wasn't red ...

I've seen stupidity you people wouldn't believe. A Tesla Roadster on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched President Donald Trump gloat in the dark near the White House Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
posted by CynicalKnight at 3:29 PM on January 10, 2018 [2 favorites]

Two missile monte?
posted by Oyéah at 11:29 AM on January 13, 2018

De-orbit, I want that in my obit. Or I want it to be my orbituary. On x-date Oyéah, failed to maintain orbit.
posted by Oyéah at 11:32 AM on January 13, 2018