> The company isn’t sure what happened to the spacecraft or if they’ll ever be returned. “The thing about the satellites is honestly they’re the least of our problems,” Chris McLaughlin, chief of government, regulatory, and engagement at OneWeb, tells The Verge. “We make two a day in the factory in Florida. So we can find ways to get a resilient solution.”
It wouldn't surprise me if they never get them back. The Russians would be wise to try and extract the software on board, just in case there are any private keys, or other useful things.
Suppose they DO get their satellites back from Russian. How long do you think it would take their engineers to go over the satellites to determine that nothing had been tampered with, and to approve them for flight?
I suspect it would probably be faster to launch the next flight's worth while reworking these and throwing away any Trusted Platform chips.
Im still curious about this as well. I wonder if their insurance policy categorizes being seized during war time by a hostile government as "force majeure".
