Eh. Maybe lost, maybe a cover story to try and hide a school-bus sized satellite in LEO (or thereabouts). The back-room part of this story is the one I hope to hear some day... Was it: 1. "Hey Elon. We are gonna say the satellite never made orbit." 2. "Don't tell Elon, but we are gonna blame his rocket for failing to deliver Zuma into orbit." 3. A poorly-designed latch failed to allow the satellite to separate from the rocket, and both burned up on re-entry. In Option 1, there has to be a pretty big secret deal on the back-end, if Elon is going to allow them to say their rocket failed after a long series of successes. And his entire future business of SpaceX being built upon the image of reliability and success. In Option 2, you gotta be pretty goddamn stupid to sabotage your ONLY heavy-launch provider's business and reputation. In Option 3, SpaceX has an incredible history of public disclosure of every single failure it has had, and how it has learned from each failure. This could get really sticky, because at some point it is going to come down to either SpaceX making a mistake in their latch design, or the DOD making the mistake. Neither is a better option. (Remember when the Mars lander plummeted into the surface like a bullet because one organization was using Metric, and the other was using Stupid American Units? Yeah. That's gonna be remembered for EVER.) And finally, I don't know the math (KB?) but a spy satellite of that size, with that much power and payload inside of it...? I'm not sure all/most of it would burn up on re-entry, because I don't think it got high enough, or fast enough, to get the heat up in the "destroys everything" range. That leaves debris on the ground/in the water. Sensitive military debris. Can you say Glomar Explorer? Or Kursk? ahem.
The Verge As far as physics, if it'll fit on a Falcon 9 it isn't big. KH-11s take a Delta IV Heavy. And the last time we had a satellite big enough for a DIVH go south we shot the fucker down.So what actually happened? No one is saying for certain, but there are a couple scenarios in which the Falcon 9 could have performed as it was supposed to and the spacecraft didn’t deploy correctly. Typically, SpaceX uses its own hardware on top of its rocket to send a satellite into orbit, what is known as a payload adapter. It’s an apparatus that physically separates the satellite from the upper part of the rocket and sends it into orbit. However, a previous report from Wired noted that Northrop Grumman provided its own payload adapter for this mission. And if that payload adapter failed, it would have left the satellite still attached to the upper portion of the rocket. That’s certainly a mission failure, but it wouldn’t necessarily be the fault of the Falcon 9.
Turns out Falcon 9 can lift around 29,000 pounds. Ironically, the the actual GVWR for a 72-passenger Thomas-Built school bus (made by our parent company, DTNA) is .... 28,999 pounds fully loaded with passengers and fuel. I have no idea how big Zuma is, but just thought it funny my off-the-cuff "school bus-sized" reference was right within one pound! :-)
Gwynne Shotwell, COO of SpaceX, made a very interesting public statement, that is clearly treading very close to the line drawn by scary spooks in Virginia caves: http://spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=52053 Basically, "Everything went well on our end." Boom.
Every class I've had that involves unit conversions brings this up since high school.Remember when the Mars lander plummeted into the surface like a bullet because one organization was using Metric, and the other was using Stupid American Units? Yeah. That's gonna be remembered for EVER.