Major Chinese Satellite Suffers Complete Failure

cyclone96 writes "China's most advanced satellite, the direct broadcast Sinosat 2, apparently suffered a major failure on orbit following launch on October 29. None of the solar arrays or antennas deployed on the spacecraft, and the Chinese are now mulling whether to destroy the spacecraft in the atmosphere. The article provides the following analysis: "The catastrophic breakdown of China's new Sinosat 2 direct broadcast satellite is the worst spacecraft failure in the history of the Chinese space program and a major setback to China's development of a new generation of larger, more powerful civilian and military satellites.""

Comments

Re:worst spacecraft failure involved loss of life

[ThosLives]

I know this is not on-topic, but I just had an interesting question come to mind, and I realize it is one to which I don't have a satisfactory answer because of all the possible scenarios: Is the loss of life bad?

There are so many nuances to that question I don't even know where to begin, other to know that it is an important and probably overlooked philosophical question. I know the first response of most people is "Of course the loss of life is bad!" but then you have to ask - "What life?" Because there is no such thing, for instance, of non-life-based food. Is loss of plant life not bad, but loss of animal life bad? What about non-sentient animals versus sentient animals? Domestic versus feral?

All those thoughts lead me to believe the first response to the question "Is the loss of life bad?" is "Sometimes yes, sometimes no." But I don't really have a firm way to evaluate when it is appropriate to classify it one way or the other, and I would estimate that most people cannot honestly make that distinction either - not because they are inept or unfeeling, but because people don't know enough information to correctly analyze the problem; that was even indicated by the AC's observation that

...the loss of a satellite might indirectly result in lost lives (or the lost opportunity to save lives), but I don't see how that can be compared with the direct death of many by a malfunctioning rocket.

That's actually fairly insightful, because it shows that there is no readily accepted way to evaluate the current loss of [human] life against potential future loss or gain of life. (I would posit that there are some ways to make this evaluation, but not everyone accepts those ways of thinking, hence my caveat of 'readily accepted'.)

In Other News, US Space Laser Test Successful

[mkcmkc]

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