A satellite belonging to multinational service provider Intelsat mysteriously broke up in geostationary orbit over the weekend.
Great, more bits of dangerous junk in orbit. The fuckers should have to clear up their mess before it fucks up other satellites.
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.
How did it break up? I wasn’t aware that Boeing was determined to be a fault in the build process.
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.
Occam’s razor
We should have captured that thing when he dropped it. It’s just going to keep causing trouble up there.
It was probably a whistleblower satellite.
Jack Welch is up there with the guy who invented leaded gasoline and the chemicals that put holes in the ozone.
Wow, Boeing keeps finding new and interesting ways to be incompetent. They seriously need their entire C-suite replaced with engineering types.
To be fair this satellite was built in 2016.
That’s after the merger.
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.
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.
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.
Man they are just on fire lately
on firerapidly decompressingLol I believe it would be rapid uncontrolled oxidation
Not in space, though?
Dude your mom’s not in space
Did the front fall off?
I guess space is technically out of the environment.
That line was really funny. The first time we heard it. Many years ago.
Not my fault it’s still relevant.
You should tow it out of the environment or something.
… 7 Members of Hezbollah Injured.
That brought a legit chuckle!
Boeing evil! Am I right! (laughter)
It was probably space garbage, and that’s seriously alarming.
You should look at some numbers before saying “probably”. It was much less probably space garbage than just Boeing. “Much less probably” here stands for “completely fucking irrelevant”.
If it hadnt exploded into peices,what would it havr exploded into instead?
Regulations
Your mom
Chunks, obviously
Smithereens!
To shreds you say
Football isn’t a game, kid
Boeing killed John Barnett.
True? I think so. Off-topic? Also true.
This is a story about Being. How could it be off topic?
Aren’t they all though?
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
Sounds like that case of the sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-contracted killing in China that one time
Hitman walk into a bar
“ow”
…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.
Samsung makes consumer grade products that are “easily” replaced or fixed. Boeing makes shit for the US military, and they will 100% get what’s coming to them when a Boeing military project spontaneously combusts.
Go look up what Samsung started out selling. They make a ton of military shit too just mostly for their own country.
Samsung’s military shit did not explode, their main sources of revenue do not involve the military anymore, and the reason for the explosion was identified and resolved.
Boeing, however, have multiple faults in fields that do deal with the military, this doesn’t end well.
Samsung’s military shit did not explode
Well I should hope its ordnance did. Lol
I do sort of feel that Samsung got a bit of a bad rep for their phones exploding because it wasn’t really their fault. The company that made the batteries took shortcuts in the manufacturing process and that’s what caused the fires. If they had followed the instructions Samsung had given them they would have been okay.
Although equally the company wouldn’t have felt the need to take shortcuts if Samsung had made the batteries to a standard design.
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.
Selective quoting is basically lying.
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.
With the context of the quote, I"m curious what the pattern you’ve identified is.
Their first mistake was building on the BeamNG platform.
Hmm, sounds like Boeing needs to fire more engineers.
And increase C-level compensation, of course.
There really is no other option.
Of course there is! They could spend more money in PR campaigns and bribes lobbying
Just gonna throw this idea out there:
What if they hired a bunch of engineers who graduated from sketchy, unaccredited colleges in foreign countries and paid them half as much much?
Is this like when Americans blamed Pakistani coders for B737/MCAS debacle only to be proven they implemented Boeing’s (fatally flawed) specifications to the letter?
I don’t know this smells of some pencil Pusher looking at an engineer going “can you bring the cost of that rubber o-ring down 13 cents”… “I know you were looking for a specific type of seal but I got this huge assortment pack right here from my local temu…”
Well, it is public knowledge that layoffs and furloughs are happening, so sadly, you’re not wrong.
And they somehow enticed Kelly Ortberg out of retirement to take over as CEO. There’s the hella juicy c-suite compensation package you talked about. He was already riding golden after he maneuvered that Rockwell Collins sale/merger/whatever.
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
“in space no one can hear you scream”
Boeing satellites: “AHHHHHH!!!”
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.
What, was it blowing a whistle?
