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DMSP F11 exploded in the same way 11 years ago. See the last paragraph here:
http://planet4589.org/space/js...

Some anonymous user from Washington DC deleted the above reference from Wikipedia on 6 June last year (and that's all they did). Now, the discussion on this site, full of clever, well-informed people, is without that information (it would have been just above F13). That in itself is interesting.

I was at a meeting last week where we were shooting the breeze over satellite-killers and how if you were going to try out your technology, what type of target would you use? For the USAF, an old, inoperational, big weather satellite was the one we would choose = F11 and now F13.

But you are right (no sarcasm intended), we have zero proof and propellant explosion is more probable.

Unfortunately, I think they did install some bleeding edge technology as a sister satellite, the F11 exploded in a very similar manner in 2004. See last item here:
http://planet4589.org/space/js...

Only interesting part of this story is that I included the JSR reference for F11 in Wikipedia in June 2004. It was deleted last year by an anonymous user in Washington DC.

We have never seen a battery failure like this before

Er, yes we have.
http://planet4589.org/space/js...

Interestingly, the earlier explosion has been excised from the DMSP's wiki entry... (I added it in 2004- have been working with the SSMI and SSMIS since 1990).

Jonathan's Space Home Page is another useful site without any fluff. Kind of ugly, but sure enough there's a table.

By the way, with an estimated population of 13.1 persons per square km under that satellite with a random reentry time, you'd get about 0.3 person inside that "hazard area". That's pretty small, but it's not zero and it doesn't look like the government's goal of less than 1/10,000. It's been said here already, but by the time it reaches Bush's desk it's boiled down to: 1) Could we make it worse? (NO) 2) Could we make it better? (MAYBE) Probabilities don't comfort victims or leaders.

(The numbers quoted above are accurate and come from a variety of sources, not all free.)

http://www.planet4589.org/jsr.html though you'll have to count the launches yourself. And Russian rocket results are comparable to US and European results. Each group has people who know what they are doing and people who don't, or are new. The new guys fail pretty regularly early on, but if they can survive the business long enough they tend to do well. The incompetents, well, that's what safety organizations are for (see for example the rocket involved in the Solar Sail experiment, a converted Russian sub missile). The guys knowing how to launch rockets still fail in the 1-3% range. Part of the problem is that one or two failures still keep you in that range unless you have hundreds of launches. and only the Russians have vehicles with more than 200 launches. Those were designed before even the Shuttle AND have more than 2 failures. Anything over about 95% success rate in the rocket business is doing alright.

The only satellites that NASA has launched recently are the Chandra Space Telescope and the ISS itself.

The most recent US Government non-NASA, non-Military satellite was NOAA-18, launched May 20, 2005 on a Boeing Delta Rocket.

If you don't believe me, check the Launch Log.

There is no requirement that NASA must launch all US government payloads. The parts of the ISS, unfortunately, were designed to fit exactly in the Shuttle Cargo Bay. There is no law stating that they must be launched by the shuttle, however, it will be expensive to modify them to take launch loads from another launcher.

There are many launch providers in the world, including Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Orbital, China, Russia, India, Ariane, Japan... and others I can't think of right now. Elon Musk thinks he can do it much cheaper than the competition. Let's see how it goes first. Personally, I think he is going to run into a lot of unexpected costs and techinical problems as the Falcon 1 evolves into the Falcon 5 and 9. I'd be happy to see him pull it off, but I have my doubts.

From the great JSR monthly report.
http://www.planet4589.org/jsr.html

Shuttle and Station
-------------------

The Shuttle has completed its return-to-flight mission, but continuing problems with debris marred the otherwise successful flight.

Discovery was launched at 1439:00 UTC on Jul 26, reaching a 54 x 229 km orbit at 1447 UTC. The OMS-2 burn at 1517 UTC raised the perigee out of
the atmosphere, with a 155 x 230 km orbit. NC-1 and NC-2 burns resulted in 226 x 285 km and 270 x 287 km orbits, as the Shuttle slowly matched
altitude and speed with the Station in a 350 x 356 km x 51.6 deg orbit. Meanwhile, external tank ET-121 fell back into the Pacific with reentry
at around 1550 UTC.

Spectacular camera views from the External Tank showed minor tile damage during ascent, and the loss of a half-meter piece of foam from the ET at
the time of SRB separation. Although the foam did not hit Discovery, the failure to stop large foam loss (a 15-cm piece was also lost from near
the bipod ramp) will have to be investigated and fixed before Atlantis can fly the next mission.

On Jul 19 the Station crew flew Soyuz TMA-6 from the Pirs docking port, undocking at 1038 UTC, and redocked with the Zarya docking port at 1108 UTC.

On Jul 28 at 1118 UTC Discovery docked at the Space Station. Hatch opening was at 1250 UTC. The first spacewalk was carried out on Jul 30
and saw tile repair tests in the payload bay, and installation of a mounting bracket for the ESP-2 stores platform on the Station's Quest module.

The second spacewalk on Aug 1 saw replacement of the Station's CMG-1 gyro. The third spacewalk on Aug 3 saw installation of the ESP-2 platform,
and the removal of two protruding pieces of tile gap-filler material from the Shuttle's heat shield.

Discovery undocked from Station at 0724 UTC on Aug 6 and landed safely on Runway 22 at Edwards Air Force Base at 1211 UTC on Aug 9.

Here's the problem: the new site not only forbids redistributing the keps (orbital parameters) to other people, which is a problem for /.-loved sites like http://www.heavens-above.com/ which tell you when things are coming overhead, but also forbids redistributing analysis based on the data. So if you have a business that's a subcontractor to a satellite operator, and your job is to analyse the orbital data and tell the satellite owner if they are drifting off station or something, then as of last week you are theoretically out of business. And even if you are using the data to provide very basic info on satellites that falls short of what you'd need to predict where the satellite is - like my newsletter at http://www.planet4589.org/ - it's not clear if you're even allowed to do that.

Now I suspect this is just a bureaucratic screwup, and the intent wasn't to be quite that restrictive. But there was way too little communication between the folks who wrote the law, the folks at USAF and NRO who understand which security concerns are real and which are bogus, and the different set of folks at USAF who run the orbital data service and had to interpret the law with very little guidance when writing up the new rules. In the absence of communication, things tend to be written to be so cover-your-ass that it gums up the works and that's what is happening.

This page is one place to learn more. It's Jonathan's Space Report, a reference monthly newsletter from a guy working at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

It tells us FSW 20 - The FSW recoverable satellite launched by China on Sep 27 returned to Earth at 0248 UTC on Oct 15, falling through the roof of a house in the village of Penglai, Sichuan province

Discussing Space programs, Jonathan's Space Report is a valuable source of info.

In the mean time, arguably the most important Remote Sensing satellite, NASA/USGS has announced last week that Landsat 7 will never get normal data anymore. After the Shuttle earlier this year... this is not good news for the space industry.