Zuma Discussion

[magnemoe]

4 hours ago, DDE said:

Electric propulsion, maybe. Strategic-class laser weapons? Nope. It's the small Counter-(Drone) Rocket Artillery Mortar category that's blooming thanks to solid-state lasers, but the megawatt-class death rays are stagnant.

I don't know if it's a typo, but we're getting there...

Wonder if artist got the idea of this

[Just Jim]

Hmmmm... ya know, my Great-grandmother's name was Zuma...

Coincidence???

 

....yeah, definitely... lmao....  

[PB666]

1 hour ago, Exploro said:

You know I had mused about that too. A stuck spacecraft would cause signifcant changes to how the Upper Stage would perform during the de-orbit manuevers.

Space would have known apriori. They would not have deorbited if PL was still attached unless ordered to by the customer. The ships have gyros, turning for a burn is effected by the inertia of the added mass.

Edited January 13, 2018 by PB666

[GoSlash27]

1 hour ago, Exploro said:

You know I had mused about that too. A stuck spacecraft would cause signifcant changes to how the Upper Stage would perform during the de-orbit manuevers.

Another big discrepancy: The U.S. Government paid Northrop- Grumman and SpaceX a billion dollars for this satellite. If that satellite is currently debris in the bottom of the Indian Ocean, where's the investigation? Even the Federal government doesn't just shrug off that kind of loss.

Best,
-Slashy

15 minutes ago, PB666 said:

Space would have known apriori. They would not have deorbited if PL was still attached unless ordered to by the customer. The ships have gyros, turning for a burn is effected by the inertia of the added mass.

Yup. The de-orbit burn would've been sluggish also, since the vehicle would've weighed many times more than nominal. But SpaceX reported that all indications were nominal. Does not compute.

[PB666]

7 minutes ago, GoSlash27 said:

Another big discrepancy: The U.S. Government paid Northrop- Grumman and SpaceX a billion dollars for this satellite. If that satellite is currently debris in the bottom of the Indian Ocean, where's the investigation? Even the Federal government doesn't just shrug off that kind of loss.

Best,
-Slashy

Yup. The de-orbit burn would've been sluggish also, since the vehicle would've weighed many times more than nominal. But SpaceX reported that all indications were nominal. Does not compute.

I don't think they could know the fate of Zuma unless the customer informed them. Unless the gyros on the F9S2 experienced a shift in gyros due to an independent explosion on Zuma.

[radonek]

20 minutes ago, GoSlash27 said:

Another big discrepancy: The U.S. Government paid Northrop- Grumman and SpaceX a billion dollars for this satellite. If that satellite is currently debris in the bottom of the Indian Ocean, where's the investigation? Even the Federal government doesn't just shrug off that kind of loss.

Wouldn't such investigation be, you know, secret?

[GoSlash27]

2 minutes ago, radonek said:

Wouldn't such investigation be, you know, secret?

Not really. The investigation wouldn't need to delve into what the payload was designed to do or who owns it, merely what went wrong and who was at fault for it's loss. The fact that the government isn't upset about chucking a billion dollars into the IO tells me that they don't think they actually lost that money.

Best,
-Slashy

[kerbiloid]

7 hours ago, PB666 said:

You are trying to fabricate hype.

?
I just noticed that if it were a sub/semi-orbital test, Falcon would look like a not the best choice for it.
I don't see how this notice could hype anybody. _{Except somebody seeking to be hyped.}

Spoiler

I have nothing against the walls of text, but, please, can you structurize them a little. It's a little hard to distinguish facts, ideas to prove and conclusions.

Spoiler

7 hours ago, PB666 said:

It could also be a giant statue of Vladimir Putin on a horse riding with a bear-chested woman. It could be designed to drop USB drives on N. Koreans. It could be an alien from Roswell NM stored at area 51 that the wanted to place in orbit before the News media could find out. IT could be a laser designed to cut the Earth in half, it could be NTR rocket that the want to test in Deep Space.
It could be Obama's secret Kenyan birth certificate . .It could be the RV from Witch Mountain.

... and emotional fantasies.

 

I can hardly believe in 10 t big stealth satellites, as such one would definitely hype anti-sat activities, just because the next stealth could be something combat.
I don't see reasons why declare a next-door secret spysat KIA if it's really working.

Today the next secret milsat has been launched by Delta IV.

So, I think, in orbit or not, Zuma is just a one more lost spysat.

[PakledHostage]

2 hours ago, PB666 said:

Space would have known apriori. They would not have deorbited if PL was still attached unless ordered to by the customer.

And that is a perfectly plausible explanation: the satellite fails to deploy from the second stage so they intentionally deorbit the second stage / satellite pair before the second stage's remaining fuel bleeds off. Time is of the essence because they need to be able to bring it down somewhere that its debris will never be recovered by hostile parties - somewhere like the Indian Ocean.

Edited January 13, 2018 by PakledHostage

[YNM]

1 minute ago, PakledHostage said:

Time is of the essence because they need to be able to bring it down somewhere that it will never be recovered by hostile parties - somewhere like the Indian Ocean.

Yeah, because the area is surrounded (almost) by ex-british counterpart. There's even still the BIOT.

 

 

Just for the record, anyway, what I thought earliest when I saw the thread title :

[PakledHostage]

4 minutes ago, YNM said:

Yeah, because the area is surrounded (almost) by ex-british counterpart. There's even still the BIOT.

Indian Ocean = thousands of km x thousands of km

Zuma << thousands of km x thousands of km

And the Indian Ocean sometimes looks like this:

Nobody is ever going to find the debris, whether that ocean is surrounded by former British colonies or not...

[PB666]

Parts will wash up on some beach someday.

[PakledHostage]

3 minutes ago, PB666 said:

Parts will wash up on some beach someday.

Maybe... If they float. And if they aren't pulverized by the waves first.

[kerbiloid]

Or ZUMA was a tank of water launched to deflect attention from also secret NROL-47.

[DerekL1963]

5 hours ago, Exploro said:

You know I had mused about that too. A stuck spacecraft would cause signifcant changes to how the Upper Stage would perform during the de-orbit manuevers.

True.  But so long as it re-oriented and de-orbited, they can claim (with a straight face)  that Falcon performed according to plan.  And no doubt in my mind the clearances and briefings to the launch crew made it quite clear that's all they could say.

[Shpaget]

5 hours ago, GoSlash27 said:

Another big discrepancy: The U.S. Government paid Northrop- Grumman and SpaceX a billion dollars for this satellite.

Where does the billion figure come from? Isn't it just another rumor?

5 hours ago, GoSlash27 said:

If that satellite is currently debris in the bottom of the Indian Ocean, where's the investigation? Even the Federal government doesn't just shrug off that kind of loss.

Us not being able to see it does not mean there is no inveatigation. And I'll repeat myself, we don't know if the mision failed. All we have are rumors.

 

5 hours ago, GoSlash27 said:

Yup. The de-orbit burn would've been sluggish also, since the vehicle would've weighed many times more than nominal. But SpaceX reported that all indications were nominal. Does not compute.

SpaceX said that their rocket performed nominally, not that the mission status is nominal. Subtle difference, but important whet it comes to our mental gymnastics.

It could have been a suborbital mission that is a complete sucess.

It could have been a failure to separate.

It could have been a proper separation but loss of contact with payload.

It could have been a complete sucess and they just won't admit it for spooky spy reasons.

So far, there are very few facts we do know to be confirmed: NG built something secret and SpaceX flung it upwards. SpaceX is rather pleased with themselves, and nobody else is talking. That's it. That is the total of facts available.

Everything else is speculation based on rumors.

[PakledHostage]

3 hours ago, Shpaget said:

So far, there are very few facts we do know to be confirmed: NG built something secret and SpaceX flung it upwards. SpaceX is rather pleased with themselves, and nobody else is talking. That's it. That is the total of facts available.

And that it stayed in orbit at least long enough to be included in the satellite catalog as "USA 280".

[PakledHostage]

There is also this (presumably real and attributable to the Zuma mission) photo taken over Sudan, 2 hours and 15 minutes after launch, that seems to suggest that it stayed up at least that long:

On 08/01/2018 at 4:24 PM, tater said:

 

[YNM]

7 hours ago, PakledHostage said:

Nobody is ever going to find the debris, whether that ocean is surrounded by former British colonies or not...

They don't need to find the debris. They could've "heard" the reentry.

[PB666]

35 minutes ago, PakledHostage said:

There is also this (presumably real and attributable to the Zuma mission) photo taken over Sudan, 2 hours and 15 minutes after launch, that seems to suggest that it stayed up at least that long:

 

Since it launch from canavaral and middle east would have been the last of the circularization burn points, that also mean it was in orbit.

15 minutes ago, YNM said:

They don't need to find the debris. They could've "heard" the reentry.

They would of hear the planned reentry of the F92s

[GoSlash27]

6 hours ago, Shpaget said:

Where does the billion figure come from? Isn't it just another rumor?

Shpaget,
 After further review, yes. That's the figure that the press and congress have been throwing around.
 

 

6 hours ago, Shpaget said:

Us not being able to see it does not mean there is no inveatigation.

 Sure it does. We have a secretive agency that launches satellites, not one that conducts investigations. And as I said, there is no need for the investigation itself to be secret. OMB could look into it without needing to know who it belongs to or what it does.
 

 

6 hours ago, Shpaget said:

And I'll repeat myself, we don't know if the mision failed. All we have are rumors.

I concur.

6 hours ago, Shpaget said:

SpaceX said that their rocket performed nominally, not that the mission status is nominal. Subtle difference, but important whet it comes to our mental gymnastics.

2nd stage deorbit is part of SpaceX's performance, and they said that went nominally. If it had a big ol' satellite stuck to it, it wouldn't have been nominal.
 

[tater]

The spacecraft, and stage 2 were certainly in orbit, and by all accounts not a low orbit that would spontaneously decay in 90 minutes.

Falcon’s job was to get the spacecraft (note that spacecraft can be singular, or plural) into orbit. If the adapter/bus was built and operated by the customer, then any failure is not ofthe F9.

As others have suggested in a few places, we have no reason to believe that it was necessarily a single satellite. Perhaps it was a few smaller (still large at 1-2 tons each) assets. Stealthed a little, and with propulsion, they might be hard to spot.

Entirely speculative, but that’s all we have, speculation.

[PakledHostage]

2 hours ago, YNM said:

They don't need to find the debris. They could've "heard" the reentry.

I don't understand your point? If the thing is doomed to re-enter, then the only choice may be where to bring it down. Presumably they'd then want to bring it down somewhere with the lowest probability that debris falls into the wrong hands. If someone is listening for that re-entry using infrasound detectors or whatever, then so be it; it would be coming down anyway.

Edited January 13, 2018 by PakledHostage

[Racescort666]

1 hour ago, tater said:

Stealthed a little, and with propulsion, they might be hard to spot.

Stealth is something that some of the more hype-y blogs have been talking about. In truth, stealth in space just isn't practical in some regard but there are a lot of ways that it doesn't necessarily need to be. Even if the orbit and location of the spacecraft is unknown temporarily, that still might be useful for the mission. 

[PB666]

2 hours ago, Racescort666 said:

Stealth is something that some of the more hype-y blogs have been talking about. In truth, stealth in space just isn't practical in some regard but there are a lot of ways that it doesn't necessarily need to be. Even if the orbit and location of the spacecraft is unknown temporarily, that still might be useful for the mission. 

All they need is not to be detected long enough to get into an orbit that is hard to follow back to the 2S PL separation point, the orbit is not over Russia for a period so that basically makes the worlds best US spy-satellited detectors need to wait until they can find 1 or more objects who orbit go unexplained by aprioris. We should add that at the same time other stuff is being added to space, and its not like satellites call out their nationalities like Sputnik one did.

Basically I think we need to cool the Zuma talk for at least a week . . . . .the challenge has been thrown out and some geek with a high powered  telescope and too much free time on his hands will find it(them) and broadcast their astronomical coordinates all over the internet.