The First Rule About Zuma: Don't Talk About Zuma (Update)
Statement From Gwynne Shotwell, President and COO of SpaceX on Zuma Launch
“For clarity: after review of all data to date, Falcon 9 did everything correctly on Sunday night. If we or others find otherwise based on further review, we will report it immediately. Information published that is contrary to this statement is categorically false. Due to the classified nature of the payload, no further comment is possible. “
It’s not official, but sources say the secretive Zuma satellite was lost, Ars Technica
“A media query to Northrop Grumman, which manufactured the satellite, was not immediately returned Monday. (Update: Tim Paynter, Vice President of Strategic Communications for Northrop Grumman, said, “This is a classified mission. We cannot comment on classified missions.”) Actions taken by SpaceX on Monday indicate its confidence in the rocket’s performance during the Zuma launch. Earlier in the day, SpaceX founder Elon Musk shared photos of the nighttime launch on Twitter. Also, the company continued with preparations for future launches, including rolling the Falcon Heavy rocket back out to a different launch pad in Florida for additional tests.”
SpaceX’S top Secret Zuma Mission Set To Launch, Wired
“Veteran aerospace manufacturer Northrop Grumman built the payload, according to a document obtained by WIRED and later confirmed by the company. The company says it built Zuma for the US government, and it’s also providing an adapter to mate Zuma with SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket.”
Highly classified US spy satellite appears to be a total loss after SpaceX launch, CNBC
“Dow Jones reported Monday evening that lawmakers had been briefed about the apparent destruction of the secretive payload — code-named Zuma — citing industry and government officials. The payload was suspected to have burned up in the atmosphere after failing to separate perfectly from the upper part of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, the report said.”
Keith’s note: No one is going to go on the record about anything Zuma did – or did not do. So its probably up to those folks who scan the skies for every object launched into – or returning from – space. They know where Zuma is “supposed” to be …
I see a lot of people suggesting that the loss of Zuma is a front, a cover to hide a successful insertion in a secret orbit or some other scam. This is JUST NOT PLAUSIBLE for many reasons. I am confident other experts on the subject will agree with me.
— Jonathan McDowell (@planet4589) January 9, 2018
Everyone should chill – there will be a formal failure investigation and while the details may be classified, we’ll know soon enough
Someone posted a reference to a Northrop Grumman-provided launch adaptor, but also that they delivered Zuma already encapsulated in the faring. That sounds (to me) very much like no one was allowed to look inside the box. And that (and other things about this mission) implies a level of security well in excess of the norm for classified, national security payloads. I have no confidence we’ll hear anything about the failure investigation.
SpaceX has two launches scheduled for the end of January. One is the SES 16/GovSat 1 from SLC-40. The other is the Paz Satellite from Vandenberg. It will be interesting to see if these launch dates slip from a stand down or if they have the confidence to launch on schedule.
The speculation is that the satellite failed to separate from the second stage. The fairings worked properly. Does anyone know who is responsible for the separation hardware? Is it typically the satellite manufacturer or the rocket manufacturer? I think the answer to this question will determine if Spacex would be at fault in the event of a separation failure. If they make this hardware yes, if not no.
I read this morning that the hardware that mounted the satellite to the second stage was provided by Northrup Grumman.
https://arstechnica.com/sci…
We already know the answer. The payload and the payload adapter fitting were produced by NG, integrated to the fairing by them and delivered encapsulated to SpaceX for launch. Anything up to fairing sep and SECO is controlled by SpaceX (and uses SpaceX hardware). Separation falls to the customer on this one. This is why many think that it is possible for both the mission to be a failure and SpaceX to say that Falcon9 performed nominally.
Separation has to be commanded by the upper stage. I know of no launch vehicle that has a payload that decides on its own when it is going to separate. It seems that a problem with that could cause the failure.
The 12v electric signal is given by the S2 guidance computer. It passes through the PAF to the Payload Adapter via the separation signal electrical harness, and the Payload Adapter separates the stage (hydraulically or with pyros, depends on the Adapter). During the launch campaign WDR, the signal going to the adapter is tested for under-volting and lag, with the adapter interface obviously not live.
The Payload Adapter which separates the Payload is provided by NG for this mission. Since F9 did its job as SpaceX publicly announced (after getting permission from the customer), it is impossible for the second stage or any SpaceX hardware or process to have anything to do with the failure (via deduction). This is why most – uneducated of course – speculation falls to the adapter or the payload itself for a probable/possible/alleged failure.
Which again, is an exercise in stupidity, as far as speculation goes, from all parts. We don’t know what happened, and it will take some decades to find out anyway. Bashing either SpaceX or NG for this is an insane notion.
The F9 cable connector could have become detached, the cable could have shorted, the cable wire insulation could have been worn through at some point and shorted against the vehicle. Not likely perhaps, but saying it’s impossible is not correct.
And a piece of orbital debris could have hit the launch adaptor. Even when they have all the telemetry in front of them, failure investigations frequently come up with a maybe about the cause of a failure. In other words, they end up listing a bunch of things which could have caused the failure and then make a guess at which one they think is most likely. In the case of Zuma, we probably won’t even learn that much (someone may, but I doubt much will be publicly distributed.)
The impossible part simply stems from the public information we have. It is impossible for SpaceX to publicly announce that the rocket worked as intended and still have their own hardware or processes fail. They simply cannot lie on something like this (we are talking about billions of dollars in outstanding and upcoming DoD contracts).
This also means they have the telemetry data (as they already said) to back this up to their customer.
According to that Wired article, NG built had both Zuma AND the payload adapter. It’d be an ironic & bitter comedy, if the F9 brought Zuma to the target orbit, maybe even exact orbital position… only to be defeated by the Customer’s own busted design of an adapter. (I also imagine more than a few NG engineers are cleaning out their desks.)
Trying to pry info out of contractors and government officials about a secret mission is quite daft. As such, any speculation is just that, speculation.
Also, since SpaceX immediately rolled out Falcon Heavy to the pad again (presumably for more tests), it doesn’t seem like they’re under active investgation due to a failure on their part.
Also, the government seems to have confirmed that the launch was a success via Twitter:
45th Space Wing
@45thSpaceWing
Congratulations Sharks & @SpaceX! What an incredible way to start off 2018 w/the world’s 1st successful launch and landing of this year!
Yes but their tweet came right after the launch and landing and they were probably not in the loop on a subsequent failure. I don’t think the whole government confirmed that the launch was a success, just the 45th Space Wing congratulating on a successful launch and landing base on what they knew at the time.
I also don’t read anything into the FH rollout. If there was a separation failure and it may have been due to a Spacex defect, they can still go ahead with the first stage hot fire but delay the launch pending resolution if there is a Spacex issue later confirmed.
I saw pictures on Twitter.
I just did a quick search. AmericaSpace posted Jeff Seibert’s picture of Falcon Heavy vertical at pad 39A at 7:06 a.m. this morning (local time).
https://twitter.com/America…
Zuma appears to have been added to the NORAD catalog, so it looks like it made orbit:
NORAD Catalog Number for ZUMA: 43098
You can cut and paste this number into a search here for the current status (no orbital elements).
https://www.celestrak.com/s…
Currently the status is “+” which is “Operational”.
How to explain all of the loose talk, I wonder?
Good question.
But it does sound like the Northrop Grumman payload adapter didn’t release the satellite and when the 2nd stage did it’s deorbit burn it took Zuma with it.
Already noted this below, but I gotta repeat it:
If true, it’s bitterly ironic if the F9 had delivered Zuma to orbit and was exactly on target at the point of separation … only to have that payload adapter, made by NG (who also made Zuma) snatch defeat from the jaws of mission success!
I know how it’s going to look in the press, but if it was a problem with the Northrop Grumman payload adaptor, this is a mission success for SpaceX. In that case, everything they were responsible for worked.
If a spacecraft is lost because its solar array doesn’t deploy after getting to orbit, no one blames the launch service provider. So, why should they be blamed for the failure of any other customer-provided hardware?
You cannot declare a successful mission if (if, we really don’t know what happened) your payload still glued to the S2 re-enters the earth and burns. This is called a launch campaign failure. You have to deploy (release) the payload at the contracted orbit to have a launch success (the payload being DoA is irrelevant to that).
Whether the LV provider is responsible for the failure though is another matter all-together. A launch campaign is a collaborative process between many actors (the customer, the payload manufacturer, the integrator, the LV provider, the range, the tracking stations etc etc). Failures have failure investigations which find the root cause, assign responsibility for the outcome and force corrective measures so that it doesn’t happen again.
Since this was a classified mission, it is not probable we are going to hear something in public about said failure, any time soon. The SpaceX announcement was made because they CAN announce something like this, and were also given permission from the customer to announce it. Nobody is going to speak about the payload itself.
Maybe I should have been more precise in my terminology. If the second stage (with Zuma still attached) made it to orbit, which it seems it did, then this is a successful Falcon 9 launch. If the payload did not deploy because of a problem with the customer-provided payload adaptor, that’s a mission failure for Zuma, but SpaceX and the Falcon 9 did everything they were asked to do. So I wouldn’t call that a launch failure. That would be holding the launch vehicle provider accountable for things the customer specifically took out of their hands.
Of course, there are ambiguous possibilities: What is a failure to deploy was due to a bad interface between the second stage and the payload adaptor? Should (or could) SpaceX have aborted the second stage deorbit after finding out the payload hadn’t deployed? (Assuming, of course, they were told.)
I saw it was reported that members of Congress and their staff were briefed on the failure. If so, that’s likely the source of the leaks.
Since no one knows it’s obviously could be, and might be aliens.
Maybe they sent Uncle Martin home in his spaceship to make a deal for Elon Musk to go to Mars 🙂
http://scalemodelnewsxtra.b…
Even if it was a failure on the Falcon 9 side, I don’t think it would necessarily delay Falcon heavy. There is no customer or government payload at risk for Falcon heavy – if it fails to sep, one tesla roadster … is in a wonky orbit?
Just to highlight how little we know, I’d like to point out a few things (largely based on today’s Aviation Week article on the subject.)
We actually don’t know Zuma reentered. What we know is that it completed one and a half orbits _at_least_, which Jonathan McDowell is quoted as saying is the minimum criteria to get a NORAD catalogue number. Aviation Week also reported “Amateur satellite watchers spotted the rocket’s upper stage venting propellant over East Africa about 2 hr. and 15 min. after launch, suggesting Zuma might be in a 900-1,000 km high orbit.”
There seem to be two actual sources for the idea of a reentry.
First, McDowell said (or implied) we would have seen it if it were still up there. I’ll take his word for it, but I’m not sure on the timing. The AW story also quotes one Ted Molczan, “a longtime satellite observer who administers the mailing list [for satellite observers].” He thinks it might take days before not seeing Zuma means Zuma isn’t in orbit.
Second, are a number of anonymous sources, variously described as in “government” and/or “industry”, and none of the reports are at all specific. So I’m not sure how valid a source that amounts to.
The whole business about a separation failure is a speculation based on close to zero data. It’s plausible, but so are many other things.
Just as an example of how odd the whole business is, consider this speculation: Zuma worked perfectly. Its mission called for a small number of orbits before a planned reentry. Call it half a dozen orbits. I don’t actually believe that, but it is every bit as consistent with the known facts as a separation failure and inadvertent deorbit. That should give you an idea how little we know about the whole thing.
Suppose…just suppose…that Zuma has a stealth coating that would render it invisible at least from the ground? Suppose that the X-37B is going to or has rendezvous with it, or possibly some other weird mission is going on. Whatever the case, apparently very few people have the need to know! Unfortunately, without details, other launch providers are going to blame SpaceX just to enhance their own reputation. (Not to mention any names, of course!)
Ah, well, on to Falcon Heavy…
Regarding sightings, if it is in orbit, I believe it won’t be visible for another week or two. And it will take a few weeks after that to put any faith in a “we don’t see it in orbit” statement.
I don’t think they would spend billions of dollars on a mission that only lasted a few orbits. There must be more cost effective ways to do whatever it was supposed to do.
It depends on the mission. It doesn’t take a whole lot of imagination to invent goals for a short-duration mission. The unusually black nature of this mission (compared with typical NRO spacecraft) suggests it wasn’t a typical mission. If the Weekly World News were still in business, you could sell them a nice story around this. It’s a playground for conspiracy theories.
But I specifically said I did not believe this. I said it fit the available data as well as other interpretations. That was just an illustration of how little we know and how many things could be possible given the near-total lack of facts.
It sounds like a loss to me but we will have to wait to see if anyone spots the satellite. I have seen some speculation that it was an NSA signal intelligence mission. If if was a loss they will have to replace it eventually. The key element for the rest of the program is that there will apparently be no investigation of the launch vehicle, so other SX missions will be unaffected. I would further note that SX has stuck to the use of separation mechanisms that are pneumatic rather than explosive and can be fully cycle tested prior to launch, while NG might have used a more traditonal pyrobolt design. This might be taken as a point in favor of the SX approach.
According to spacepolicyonline, he second stage remained in orbit for 1.5 orbits and then performed an automatic deorbit burn, thus the mission received a NORAD catalog number but is no longer in orbit. One would think that the deorbit would have been delayed if there had been some hope of achieving separation, but presumably the second stage would have run out of battery power and become uncontrollable within a few hours so there was no way to keep it in orbit to troubleshoot the separation problem.
The SpaceX would still need to provide the separation command and possibly power for the explosive charge.
Possiby but we do not know. Since NG supplied the payload adapter as well as the spacecraft, separation could have been commanded by the spacecraft. We do not even know if the second stage re-entered; if not it is hard to see how this could have ocurred with the spacecraft, particularly from a 900km orbit.
I have never heard of a payload being able to command its separation from the launch vehicle.
I’m trying to imagine how the payload would know when to separate. Among other things, a Falcon 9 can complete its mission with an engine out, by burning longer or with a different thrust profile. But that changes the time for separation. So how would the payload know about that? Unless it’s doing some sort of autonomous navigation and orbit determination before it’s deployed, I can’t see it. And I can’t see a spacecraft doing anything like that before deployment. I know Zuma is an exception to the usual practices, but aren’t almost all spacecraft launched in a low-power, standby mode (if not essentially off)?
For the NG adapter yes, but they don’t use explosives on their own adapter. They use pneumatics, because you can test them.
The NRO has flown a lot of signal intelligence missions for the NSA, why would this SIGINT mission be any different from all the others in not being managed by NRO?
Seems odd that we get leaks suggesting the launch failed before we’ve gotten any leaks about what the mission was or who owned it. All we know is that the rocket worked, and the rockets job was to put a payload in orbit.
I’m wagering that sharks is safe and sound until someone of official capacity goes on record to say otherwise.
It seems the only concrete thing we know is that SpaceX/Gwynne Shotwell says that everything went according to plan on the SpaceX side. It’s hard to discount that.
There are so many unknowns on the NG side. Was this satellite built on a common bus, or was it all brand new? How was testing done before the launch?
I think the best we can assume is that if SpaceX’s two Falcon 9 launches at the end of the month don’t get delayed, that likely means whatever happened on Zuma wasn’t a SpaceX issue…….maybe.
This is probably an impossible question to answer, but how many other launch vehicles have an ambiguous reliability? On Wikipedia, there’s an ongoing discussion about how to class the Zuma launch, in terms of the number of Falcon 9 launch attempts and successful launches. That’s something we may never resolve. But does that same issue apply to other launch vehicles, past and present? There have been more than enough highly classified launches over the years, so I’d expect there would be some launches with publicly unknown results.