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SpaceX Cleared In $3.5 Billion Zuma Failure

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
April 9, 2018
Filed under , ,
SpaceX Cleared In $3.5 Billion Zuma Failure

SpaceX not to blame for lost mystery satellite, report says, Cnet
“A super secretive US government satellite SpaceX launched in January never made it to orbit after it failed to separate from the upper stage of a Falcon 9 rocket. Three months later, it still appears the satellite manufacturer Northrop Grumman may be to blame for the loss and not SpaceX. A new report from The Wall Street Journal published late Sunday says two teams of investigators have found that a payload adapter, which was modified by Northrop Grumman to accommodate the reportedly sensitive spy satellite, is the culprit behind the loss of the $3.5 billion craft.”
Zuma Update: SpaceX Exonerated by USAF, earlier Post

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

24 responses to “SpaceX Cleared In $3.5 Billion Zuma Failure”

  1. Vladislaw says:
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    Well that is finally(?) settled.

    • james w barnard says:
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      Since nobody in the Pentagon is claiming ownership of Zuma, we don’t really KNOW what “finally” happened to Zuma. Suppose it “fell back into the atmosphere,” lighted off a supersonic ramjet and flew somewhere at hypersonic speed, landing at some secret location…say, Johnson Island. At least they cleared SpaceX.

      • BigTedd says:
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        We don’t even know if perhaps Zuma was meant to do exactly what it did !!

        • Michael Spencer says:
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          James Oberg points out that, under a relatively unusual set of circumstances, the payload still attached to the second stage was visible from the ground (Sudan); and that the motion appeared anomalous.

          But maybe that’s how it was designed to appear.

  2. Steve Pemberton says:
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    Apparently there is some newer data and/or revised analysis, as the previous report indicated that the satellite remained attached or partially attached to the second stage. This newer article indicates that the satellite did eventually separate. However;

    by this point the rocket and satellite had already fallen too far back toward the atmosphere

    Which implies that the satellite separated after the second stage had already performed its reentry burn for a controlled deorbit.

  3. Keith Vauquelin says:
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    Good for SpaceX.

    A legacy player in the business fails, and $3.5B of taxpayer money is incinerated. Where is the accountability for such a loss? Do heads roll?

    And at the same time, the legacy players in this business want to see SpaceX fail.

    SpaceX has had and will have failures. No one should believe SpaceX is infallible.

    The difference is, SpaceX has the DNA for success-driven results, and is not Jabba the Hutt looking for his next lascivious pleasure.

    As long as SpaceX’ leadership is demanding of higher level of acceptable standards and practices, they will continue to trounce legacy players.

    Good luck, Guys. TAKE NO PRISONERS.

    • Michael Spencer says:
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      And just exactly what’s wrong with “lascivious pleasure”?? 🙂

      • ProfSWhiplash says:
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        Uh… when it’s with someone named “Jabba?” (climaxed with the “Pit of Sarlacc” … you may want the pit first) X-P

    • cynical_space says:
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      >As long as SpaceX’ leadership is demanding of higher level of acceptable standards and practices,

      Hmmm, do you have any kind of quantitative evidence for that claim? Put another way, can you point to something specific and measurable that supports what you are claiming?

  4. tutiger87 says:
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    3.5 billion dollar spacecraft? And they say NASA wastes money?

    • Michael Spencer says:
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      $3.5 Billion is chump change in NASA-land.

      • tutiger87 says:
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        And just where do you get that from?

        • Jeff2Space says:
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          Maybe he’s thinking about the billions blown on SLS/Orion every single year. Its first unmanned flight is still three years away (with an interim upper stage) and the first manned flight (with the first “real” upper stage) still six years away. So we’ve got many more years and even more billions of dollars to blow before we fly a single astronaut in Orion.

          And the cherry on the sundae is that SLS will always be completely expendable in a world where reusable launch vehicles are coming into their own.

        • Michael Spencer says:
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          I should have prefaced that remark with the <snark> tag. Apologies. But as Jeff pointed out, I was thinking about SLS/Orion, and I’ll tell you why.

          Remember that my POV is that of a non-scientist, non-NASA, external observer. Just an armchair critic, nothing more than a tax paying, starry-eyed space supporter.

          While SLS gets beat up a lot in these pages, I do like to point out that, price aside, SLS is one hell of a piece of engineering. Period. It is the work of countless talented engineers and support staff building the best machine they can.

          The SLS bork is a NASA management issue. It’s a policy screw up. So when I characterize $ Billions as ‘chump-change’, I am thinking of the guys charged with making and managing policy decisions. The people who are supposed to set direction, and to figure out the niceties of government contracting that yield something more than a one sided contract.

          So, yea. Chump change. And I don’t like being a chump.

          • sunman42 says:
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            Wouldn’t you say the “SLS bork” is the result of “design by Congress?”

          • Michael Spencer says:
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            I’m really not sure. It’s easy to pile-on with everyone else, pointing to porcine job creation; the facts are the facts, as they say.

            But: I have learned a few things as the decades pass by. And one of those things is that relationships matter. That appearances don’t often truly explain observation. That “momentum” applies to just about every human endeavor.

            And most of all, that the world is very, very complicated.

            It appears that the word “incestuous” might be a more descriptive word for the relationship between NASA and Congress.

  5. Michael Spencer says:
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    Here’s an interesting discussion of issues surrounding payload separation, including some alternative methods that have been used over the space decades:

    http://www.thespacereview.c

    I found particularly interesting the discussion about which part of the stack actually makes driving decisions: the booster, succeeding stages, or (in part) the payload.

    • Steve Pemberton says:
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      The article that you linked to included several examples where the launcher failed to send a separation command. The article didn’t mention it but you would think that as a backup in those situations the spacecraft could have an accelerometer which can detect when upper stage engine cut off has occurred. If the launcher fails to send a separation command, then a predetermined number of seconds after detecting engine cut off the spacecraft could issue the separation command itself. In case of launches that require one or more restarts of the upper stage that shouldn’t be a problem it’s a simple matter of counting the engine starts and cut offs, which it has to do anyway since it will be detecting the cut off of the first stage earlier in the launch. Of course that means the spacecraft has to be able to send the separation command but that doesn’t seem to be a new capability. The only potential drawback is it adds another thing to go wrong, i.e. you don’t want the spacecraft to accidentally send a separation command at the wrong time.

      • Michael Spencer says:
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        Actually, I did wonder why no failsafe device was included in such a critical system, but your suggestion didn’t occur to me.

        Being curious, I’m going to ask the author.

        • Steve Pemberton says:
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          Of course the spacecraft designer can’t just up and decide to add separation initiation capability, as that also has to be supported by the launcher. If the launcher doesn’t support it already then modifications would be needed, which they may or may not be willing to do, especially if just one customer is requesting it.

          Another thing that I realized from reading the article is that there are so many different types of separation failures, with various causes. Anticipating and mitigating problems I would think reaches diminishing return at some point, since a a particular failure mode is going to be somewhat rare, and as I mentioned the mitigations themselves could introduce risk.

          The recent Zuma incident also brings up something else to at least consider. Although we don’t know the details, it sounds like if the second stage deorbit burn could have been delayed the satellite may have been able to eventually separate and remain in orbit. Although it wasn’t SpaceX’s fault, I wonder why the second stage couldn’t have detected that separation hadn’t occurred, and hold off on the planned deorbit burn. Maybe they normally can detect separation but not in this case because of the different payload adapter. I’m also not sure if they would have a way to send commands to the second stage to later initiate a manual burn, if not then they could program it to at least wait a few days before deorbit to give the engineers on the ground a chance to troubleshoot and possibly solve the problem. Although I suppose that introduces yet another risk since the second stage is probably not designed to loiter for several days, which could create risk that the delayed deorbit burn will not occur. But that just means uncontrolled second stage deorbit, which is not ideal but not really a huge risk to people on the ground compared to what else is already raining down.

  6. Daniel Woodard says:
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    Looking through the SpaceX payload user handbook, the user can provide their own payload adapter. That does not make it a good idea. Failures in systems that only have to work once are virtually always deterministic rather than random, i.e. the result of an unanticipated failure mode. Deterministic failures cannot be prevented by analysis or redundancy because they involve failure modes that no one thought of. They can be prevented by testing. That’s one reason SpaceX uses pneumatic latches rather than pyrobolts in its release mechanisms; pyrotechnic devices cannot be tested without destroying them.

    The most reliable system is usually the one with the most operational experience, assuming any problems that came up were corrected by appropriate changes int he design. We don’t have the facts, but it is just possible that an extremely expensive payload was flown on an adapter mechanism that had never flown, at least in this precise configuration. The fact that the payload eventually separated (apparently after the second stage deorbit burn, unfortunately) suggests it could be a software rather than hardware problem, unless the separation occurred after entry interface due to aerodynamic forces.

  7. DJE51 says:
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    Someone, or possibly some committee, a few years ago made a decision to use the release mechanism that failed, rather than rely on a SpaceX part. I would hope that, in the course of this investigation, that decision and the person or people behind it will have to explain why they made this decision (to their bosses, of course we will never learn of it), and at the very least be reprimanded if it was anything that they could have foreseen. It seems to me that with a $3.5B satellite, either better testing or a better decision could have been made.

  8. Kevin Hoover says:
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    Mr. Dunning suggests that the failure was a cover story for a stealthsat.

    https://skeptoid.com/episod