The satellite spotters will be all over this; in a couple of days we should know whether something is orbiting or not.
And if something is orbiting but not making any burns to correct or change its orbit, it is dead.
I suppose one of the potential problems with classified payloads is that the guys doing the launch might not know everything they should know in order to make it work properly.
“Need to know” from the client’s perspective and “need to know” from the contractor’s perspective - now there’s a Venn diagram…
AFAIK, from the launch provider’s POV, every satellite is just a box of a certain size and weight. They launch it into the designated orbit, then push the “deploy” button, which causes the satellite to detach from the launch vehicle and start doing whatever it’s programmed to do, and the launch provider’s work is then done.
If it really is a failure, the failure occurred in the satellite after deployment and has nothing whatsoever to do with them, or Spacex would not be saying everything went nominally on their end.
Exactly.
Only when a parameter like weight is not that certain or changed a bit without notice, burn time for the upper stage might be off a bit too. Making the payload deceide “nope, not at nominal altitude yet, ain’t gonna separate”.
Might be something like that. Or Blofeld being up to his old tricks again.
We don’t even know if they put a satellite inside the fairing. It could have been some sort of technology demonstration for a re-entry device for all we know.
First, spacex has scales. Second, a customer who tried shenanigans like that would be told “do you want your payload to get to orbit or not? If you want it to get to orbit, you need to give us accurate specs for these parameters.”
Remember, SpaceX does not care what is inside the wrapper labeled top secret. But they do care about their reputation. Your launch record - x successful launches out of y attempts - is everything in the space launch industry. Spacex would not put up with anything that would interfere with their ability to perform their job of getting the payload to its orbit and putting another notch on their belt of successful launches.
eta: And contrawise, if the rocket failed somehow, they would absolutely not go along with claiming it succeeded, because they would want to launch a full scale investigation to determine the cause of the failure so they could prevent it from ever happening again.
In case anyone here remembers Dave Barry’s “How to Argue Effectively,” I noticed the editor of SpaceIntelReport is literally asking, “What are your parameters?”
I’m no space scientist, but one of the replies appears to be tracking info for the very same satellite (can someone confirm?):
“Lost” sounds like something a non-existent NRO or NSA official, who doesn’t exist, would tell-but-not tell, maybe through a false drop story, for a satellite which is operational but is now operating with plausible deniability. Seriously though, I hope it was all on something within the fairing and not the rocket itself. I really, want to see the success of F9 Heavy. Hngh!
