this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2024
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A satellite belonging to multinational service provider Intelsat mysteriously broke up in geostationary orbit over the weekend.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 17 hours ago

🎢 It's not the best choice it's Spacers Choice!🎢

[–] [email protected] 28 points 22 hours ago (2 children)

Wow, Boeing keeps finding new and interesting ways to be incompetent. They seriously need their entire C-suite replaced with engineering types.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 hours ago

Sorry, I just bought several Boeing stocks at the time they didn't kill anyone yet, and now they have to do all that stuff to not let me out with a profit

[–] [email protected] 7 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago) (1 children)

The saddest thing about that is they mostly are.

Business majors are the office grunts and middle managers of corporatism. Capital interests are more than aware that business degrees are basically adult daycares, and prefer engineering or law degrees for C-levels in industry.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

I saw an interview with Jack Ma (I think) where he said his job isn’t to be the smartest at the job. His job is to find the smart people and make sure they work together. I think that may be what’s happening here. Leadership is incapable of holding the engineers accountable and making sure they follow all safety protocols. Whether that is incompetence or malice I’m sure we’ll never know for sure.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 hours ago

For Boeing it is absolutely known to be malice. They don't "fail" to hold the engineers accountable. They push out the engineers that want to follow safety protocols and it is well documented.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8oCilY4szc

[–] [email protected] 8 points 17 hours ago

Jack Welch is up there with the guy who invented leaded gasoline and the chemicals that put holes in the ozone.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 21 hours ago (2 children)

I'm honestly happy to see that it just had a fuel malfunction instead of the implication of an outside cause...

[–] [email protected] 6 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago)

That was a previous satellite. This one appears to still be unknown if I'm not mistaken.

Makes me wonder if we have some Kessler Syndrome on our hands... πŸ‘€πŸ‘€πŸ‘€

Probably not. Anyway.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 13 hours ago (3 children)

Yeah, blowing up satellites and cutting undersea internet cables would be (a short) prelude to world war III.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 hours ago

I think it would take a lot longer than you expect with those shenanigans, but its still not good yeah.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 hours ago

Nah it was both

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 hours ago
[–] [email protected] 114 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

That's actually quite impressive because most satellites just don't do anything when they die. Boeing's vehicles die with flare, and depressing regularity

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 day ago

That's only because they're designed with passivation to vent tanks and disconnect batteries to remove sources of explosion when they start to die. If that fails the tanks eventually pop from thermal cycling or the solar panels overcharge the battery until it blows up like a Russian satellite did earlier this year.

[–] [email protected] 43 points 1 day ago

"in space no one can hear you scream"

Boeing satellites: "AHHHHHH!!!"

[–] [email protected] 117 points 1 day ago

What, was it blowing a whistle?

[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

... 7 Members of Hezbollah Injured.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 22 hours ago

Wouldn't it be a bit more concerning if it exploded into smaller, yet complete satellites..? Exploding "into pieces" seems downright SOP to me.

[–] [email protected] 42 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Great, more bits of dangerous junk in orbit. The fuckers should have to clear up their mess before it fucks up other satellites.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 day ago

This is actually a real problem more so in this case than most. There's an awful lot of satellites in low Earth orbit, altitude of a few hundred to several hundred kilometers. Atmospheric drag still exists here a little bit, and thus space junk will reenter and burn up in years or decades.

This satellite was in geostationary orbit, at an altitude of about 36,000 km. Debris up there can take hundreds of years to come down. Geostationary is a special altitude where the satellite orbits at exactly the same rate as the Earth spins. That means that a fixed dish on Earth will always point at the satellite without needing to move or track. So there's just one narrow orbital ring around the equator for that. That ring is not a place we want space junk to be, because if it gets too hazardous for satellites in GEO that basically removes our capability as a species to use fixed satellite dishes for anything. And that problem won't go away for centuries.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

How did it break up? I wasn't aware that Boeing was determined to be a fault in the build process.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 day ago

Yeah fair point. Boeing has a degraded reputation these days but at the mo we don't know why it broke up. Probably never will. I'm kinda going on Occam's razor here.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 day ago

The door plug again?

[–] [email protected] 44 points 1 day ago (1 children)

This is slightly concerning. Satellites don't tend to explode on their own, but it is a Boeing design with a history of leaky propulsion, so who knows?

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

Sure it was a Comm satellite for the world's tensest area, which is about to go to bigger war.

who would have ASAT capability at GEO?

how could it be launched to GEO undetected?

[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 day ago

If you’re a government, you can pretty much put anything in a rocket fairing and call it a reconnaissance satellite.

The only warning that actually has to be given is that a rocket is being launched, so you don’t accidentally trigger WW3 by setting off launch detection satellites without warning. After it’s in space, no one can really tell what was in the fairing. Could be a spy satellite, could be navigation. Could just be a box with a bunch of little rockets in it, designed to slam into whatever you want at ridiculous speed.

But it’s way more likely that this was just Boeing having a tiny leak in a propellant tank, or a bad thruster and as soon as the concentration of propellant and oxidizer got high enough, it triggered a detonation. They certainly have a history of not leak testing their shit: airplanes falling apart, space capsules with leaky thrusters, and now a blown up satellite point more towards incompetence than malice.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Is this a trick question? Cause you might as well be asking a 1600s peasant how to develop film.

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[–] [email protected] 253 points 1 day ago (3 children)

It was probably a whistleblower satellite.

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[–] [email protected] 74 points 1 day ago (3 children)

Man they are just on fire lately

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[–] [email protected] 184 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (6 children)

Surprised Pikachu face...

IS-33e was the second satellite to be launched as part of Boeing's "next generation" EpicNG platform. The first, dubbed IS-29e, failed due to a propulsion system fuel leak.

I see a pattern.

[–] [email protected] 173 points 1 day ago (10 children)

Hmm, sounds like Boeing needs to fire more engineers.

And increase C-level compensation, of course.

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[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Boeing: outsources to an outsourcer who outsources to an outsourcer who outsources to an outsourcer who outsources to an outsourcer and so on and still has the shamelessness of appearing surprised at the shit quality and reliability they deliver

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Sounds like that case of the sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-contracted killing in China that one time

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 hours ago

Hitman walk into a bar

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 day ago

Satellite: "But I wasn't boing anything wrong!"

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 day ago (4 children)

Rapid unscheduled disassembly.

Plus β€œInto pieces” is rather unnecessary there.

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I'm not really into the stock market, but I would not buy Boeing at the moment.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 17 hours ago

I dunno, I think they could still surprise us with new ways to fuck up.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 day ago (5 children)

Now would be the best time to do it

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Unless it's a dead cat moment :)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 16 hours ago

I don't think government will let the company fold. The stock will go up not in the short term but over 10-15 years it will surely fly.

Having said than enron is still in the back of the mind.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 day ago

Was it a Satellite Max?

[–] [email protected] 44 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

...was designed and manufactured by Boeing Space Systems and launched in 2016. It provided broadband services, including internet and phone communication services, to parts of Europe, Africa, and most of Asia.

IS-33e was the second satellite to be launched as part of Boeing's "next generation" EpicNG platform. The first, dubbed IS-29e, failed due to a propulsion system fuel leak. Intelsat declared the satellite a total loss in April 2019, later attributing it to either a micrometeoroid strike or solar weather activity.

What caused IS-33e to break up in orbit remains unclear, however. Intesalt officials did observe that it was using far more fuel than it should be to maintain its orbit shortly after launching eight years ago, shaving off 3.5 years of its 15-year lifetime.

Could be a coincidence, but I feel "Boeing leaks" approaching "Samsung exploding" levels of memification (where they had washers, phones and some other things all exploding, and the look was not great).

Samsung shook the meme off, but I feel like Boeing will have a harder time.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

did you know that high powered lasers are invisible to the naked eye without a sufficient particulate medium to pass through?

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 day ago

Good thing I'm wearing clothes.

[–] [email protected] 74 points 1 day ago (10 children)
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