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Rumors Swirl That Secret Zuma Satellite Launched By SpaceX Was Lost (scientificamerican.com)
Many media outlets are reporting that the U.S. government's top-secret Zuma satellite may have run into some serious problems during or shortly after its Sunday launch. Zuma was launched atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station Sunday evening -- a launch that also featured a successful landing back on Earth by the booster's first stage. While everything seemed fine at the time, rumors began swirling within the spaceflight community that something had happened to Zuma. "According to one source, the payload fell back to Earth along with the spent upper stage of the Falcon 9 rocket," Ars Technica's Eric Berger wrote. Scientific American reports: To be clear: There is no official word of any bad news, just some rumblings to that effect. And the rocket apparently did its job properly, SpaceX representatives said. "We do not comment on missions of this nature, but as of right now, reviews of the data indicate Falcon 9 performed nominally," company spokesman James Gleeson told Space.com via email. Space.com also reached out to representatives of aerospace company Northrop Grumman, which built Zuma for the U.S. government. "This is a classified mission. We cannot comment on classified missions," Northrop Grumman spokesman Lon Rains said via email. All we know about the satellite itself is that it was destined for a low-Earth orbit and built for the U.S. government. We will update this story if we hear anything else about Zuma's status.
... how life imitates art?
"Classified" does not mean secret. It merely means that it got assigned a classification level. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
But films in particular seem to find it using "classified" instead of the actual classification level much cooler. And now people use it for real.
Smart people around the world have learned to look for the extra "darkness" of a US sat thats trying to hide.
No new darkness, no new bright light ? No new sat? Did they get it just right this time?
Misty (satellite) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Keeping the population in closed science cities kept other nations human spies out.
Re "If it's super secret then maybe they made it disappear"
Most nations with "nuclear" ambitions and other well hidden production lines have their "university" "astronomers" map the spies above their nation.
For anything new and bright. Anything "new" that blocks out the existing data. Anything on the move.
Nobody wants a new spy sat or spy platform thats on the move over their nation at an unexpected times.
The mil toys get worked on when the spy sats have passed for a time then hide again.
For the price of a few "astronomers" and a super computer any nation could have had some level of secrecy.
That space plane upset all their nice calculations with its wide changes every 24h.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Depends on who is making the claim it was lost, if it was the Govt, then i would say possible cover up. If it was neutral 3rd parties that might have been monitoring the launch then there might be some truth to it. For example you could have been following the launch with a telescope and see the upper stage blow up in space. Though thats not to say that the upper stage couldn't have had multiple components, one piece designed as a decoy to blow up, while the real payload continued on is way. Would make it seem to a witness on the ground that something wrong happened, while the actual payload continued safely on its way.
Well, it did achieve low-earth orbit... just somewhat lower than planned, and its tidally locked with the planet. But it's still orbiting once every 24 hours.
If only we had a spacecraft that could maneuver close to it, grab it with a big arm, put it in the spacecraft's payload bay, and take it where it was supposed to go. That would be amazing.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Yep.
Right now the focus is being put on the payload adapter, which mates the spacecraft to the stage. Normally SpaceX provides their own adapters, but for this mission, Northrop created a custom adapter for the spacecraft (makes you wonder what the unusual requirements were?)
If the satellite was to be some sort of "stealth" payload, capable of hiding from ground observation, then "faking a separation failure" might be a perfectly prudent course of action. However, for most satellites, it would be immediately obvious whether it had separated or not, to any nation paying attention. And I'm sure lots of nations were paying attention to this.
The chloride owes the sodium money.