It is particularly bad for a satellite in geostationary orbit to break up or fail. Satellites are packed as tightly as possible into that orbit due to its economic importance (it's very useful for a satellite, particularly communications satellites, to always be over the same part of the Earth), so there is a higher than normal likelihood that this could be seriously disruptive.
Yes there's no air resistance, but also most of the fragments aren't going your way.
If you have a 25 m^2 cross section in the direction of the explosion, at that distance you have a roughly 1 in 246 billion chance of any given bit of debris hitting you.
It might not place neighbors at appreciable risk but wouldn't debris still prevent replacing the failed satellite with another one at the same precious original address?
No, because the debris = tiny pieces of aluminum, will be pushed around by solar radiation.
Also, there’re tiny meteorites, and other pieces of debris colliding with it, which adds energy to the system, if you like.
TLEs are not maintained for small debris, so you can’t really predict conclusively. But my hunch is that eventually, the orbit will become a bit more parabolic, precession of which could put it into a trajectory of a S/C and cause a collision.
Things in geo orbit aren't perfectly stable, since the Earth's gravitational field is not perfectly uniform. Without active station keeping things tend to gather at two particular longitudes over the equator. So eventually that debris will probably end up at those points.
What is the chance of getting hit by further broken pieces of that satellite and other satellites?
When calculating risk, you have to take into account how many are there and what is the chance that any will be hit. Then you have to calculate what's the chance this will happen again, etc - and only then you can calculate the risk to your own satellite.
It's true that the chance of getting hit by one broken satellite is small. But that assumes there are exactly 2 things on the orbit.
> If you have a 25 m^2 cross section in the direction of the explosion, at that distance you have a roughly 1 in 246 billion chance of any given bit of debris hitting you.
The 'units' command line tool has been part of Unix since Bell Labs, and GNU Units came along in 1997.
Personally I used basic high school geometry knowledge of "what's the area of a sphere", and you could also have just asked WolframAlpha, which also predates LLMs.
Yet a formula that actually calculates the probability of impact is nowhere to be found in your response. You don’t consider mass, density, velocity, orbits, or anything else for that matter.
The formula is an excercise for the reader, even if my audience was a 14 year old learning about this for the first time. As is figuring out why "mass" and "density" are unimportant.
Might be a valuable lesson in "reading the question carefully" for them, though, as the scenario was: "That’s pretty close when your neighbor just exploded", which is why orbital mechanics can be disregarded in this instance.
Getting hit by debris that flies away directly from an explosion would very bad luck indeed. Just think about how well you would have to aim to hit someone 10km away.
But some debris (in particular slower pieces) will probably oscillate around the geostationary orbit giving it countless chances of hitting other satellites.
Has someone modelled this for example in Kerbal space program?
> But some debris (in particular slower pieces) will probably oscillate around the geostationary orbit giving it countless chances of hitting other satellites.
Almost all of the debris will have orbits which intersect their orbit of origin.
well while that is true only debris that has the right speed will stay there. the issue is that debris will probably have gotten some impulse that turns it orbit elliptical. that means it will slowly ratchet along geo touching it every day or so at a different place. so you get a changes every day for every piece to hit something. And even a big piece that might just have a delta of 30km/h might damage your panels on your working Sats.
That doesn't seem very close in terms of the area traced out by each object in relation to the area of the sphere? (And less if you consider volume since they won't be at exactly the same altitude.)
It can reach you, sure. But the chances of hitting are miniscule. If you could throw a basketball a few hundred kilometres you're still likely to miss the net.
If you want to dismiss an argument, maybe do the math instead of saying "do the math" dismissively and inventing an arbitrary number without even saying across how much time that estimate is supposed to be (one in a billion, what, instantaneously? In the first hour?)
It's kind of expected here if you are going to call out someone's math to give the process you arrived to yours. Not so much a rule but expected courtesy :) "the solution is left as an exercise to the reader" is not very helpful to an argument.
From Wikipedia, it looks like it's a USSF satellite launched in 2019 with a service life of 14 years. It provides wideband communications to DoD customers.
It's 0.3 degrees ahead in orbit. Which means the debris needs to speed up to collide. It's possible if the break-up was explosive, but most, if not all of the debris is more likely to stay at the same velocity or slow down.
Speeding up does not work, that'll just put it in a higher orbit. My understanding of these issues is that introduced eccentricity gets you: if it takes the "inside corner" (is that the English word for binnenbocht/innenkurve?) around the earth, it could then then meet you on the other side where the orbits intersect. If it sped up (flying out of the corner, in this race analogy) and thereby took a longer way around, it'd rather be a danger to those immediately behind (with each orbit, progressively further back along the circular orbital path)
Disclaimer: this comes from playing a self-made orbital mechanics game, I have no training whatsoever let alone professional experience with this
> Speeding up does not work, that'll just put it in a higher orbit
Speeding up doesn't raise the orbit; it makes it (more) elliptical while still intersecting with the old orbit (shared with neighbouring satellites)- you need at least 2 maneuvers to raise an orbit. You're also assuming a perfectly pro-grade acceleration. In an explosion, different pieces go in different directions, I suspect there is a vector that results in faster speed in the same orbit, but I'm no rocket scientist.
Correcting an inaccuracy in the last sentence I introduced in an edit: Kepler's laws means you cant have different velocities in the same orbit - bit its possible for an explosion to cause a projectile to intercept a satellite that was ahead of it in a new orbit.
Thanks, but don't expect too much! (In particular on mobile where you can't zoom by scroll wheel or use arrow keys to fly.) I mentioned it in an earlier comment, probably easiest to refer back to that for some context/hints: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35763506
Any velocity changes will only happen once so will result in an eccentric orbit where only one side of the orbit is raised or lowered -- the other side will still be in SSO.
Most of the debris will have eccentric orbits with varied periods which intersect geostationary orbits. Every satellite in a geostationary orbit is at risk, not just the ones near it.
Not to mention debris can be in GEO for a long, long time. People worry about LEO constellations causing Kessler syndrome, but the reality is that LEO debris deorbits in the order of months/years. GEO is much, much longer.
> Not to mention debris can be in GEO for a long, long time.
On human timescales, it's basically forever. Hopefully we'll develop the tech to clean up debris in space, but it's extra challenging to do it in geostationary orbit since it's so far away from Earth, both in terms of actual distance, and delta-V.
> People worry about LEO constellations causing Kessler syndrome, but the reality is that LEO debris deorbits in the order of months/years.
It's a little more complicated than that. The time to spontaneously deorbit is based on orbital height. Starlink can deorbit on its own in 5-10 years because it's orbiting so low. But any OneWeb satellites that malfunction[1] will take 1000+ years to deorbit because they're up at 1000+ km.
Yep! That's a great point! I forgot that LEO encompasses quite a bit of difference as well. Starlink has been in the news lately, so that's mostly where my mind was. I believe the newly announced Starlink shells are even lower, so that's good news from a failure standpoint.
> Hopefully we'll develop the tech to clean up debris in space
Rendezvousing is pretty established tech so long as you know a precise and stable orbit of your target, afaik? Which, for geo, we would I think. So taking up some grabbing mechanism probably does it, then use ion engines, burning retrograde (avoiding the need for heavy fuel) until you get it to a low LEO orbit, let loose, and let the problem solve itself within a few ~weeks. Then move on to the next piece, so you don't need a launch to orbit for every individual piece of debris. You also don't have to circularise your orbit to just rendezvous and grab it. And you probably also don't have to go out of plane even if the target object is, if I'm visualising this correctly, because there's always a node where the planes intersect and you can just start the path up to geo at the right point in your LEO orbit
Grossly simplified, devil in the details, but this seems very possible with today's technology and potentially less expensive in terms of delta V than it may seem at first glance
The most important contributor to a Kessler-like scenario is extremely high relative speed of items traveling on crossing orbits. It’s not very relevant to the situation in a single geostationary orbit shared by all the objects.
Note that for every 1 km at the earths surface, you get 6.61 km at geostationary orbit. So there's quite a bit of room (264,924 km circumference vs 40,075km at ground level).
No, you cannot shift orbit with a single burn maneuver so whatever explosion unless it exploded the other way later cannot shift orbit if the pieces accelerated relative to earth they’re going into a higher orbit if they decelerated they go into a lower orbit
Transverse thrust would cause a procession which should be very unlikely to hit another Geo stationary satellite in the future
Without having details of the explosion, I imagine some parts will slow down and some will speed up. They'll all be clustered together around the original orbit, and will take many years to drift any considerable distance unless it was a very high velocity explosion.
I remember this taking a second to click in high school physics class. The initial thought is that after an explosion all of the pieces fly away from a stationary point. The satellite is not stationary, so the pieces "flying away" only have their speed subtracted from the speed of the satellite.
The fact that orbital speeds are faster than explosions took a bit to sink in.
How is it tangential? It's directly related. The satellite is moving in a straight line at a specific speed. The explosion does not negate that speed, rather it just applies a momentary bit of acceleration/deceleration along a new vector. So unless an explosion can provide more acceleration that can null out the original object's speed, the pieces will remain in orbit. That's just how fast orbital speeds are, and it took a bit for that to click
But we’re worried about the pieces hitting another satellite in goe stationary orbit further along the orbit. A single burn can’t do that in a direct way because there is no direct path between two satellites at the same orbital distance (speed)
Another blunder for Boeing right up next to naming things „Epic Next Generation“…
What’s with the missing insurance? Didn’t they get any insurance because of the previous debacle with a Intelsat where they couldn’t decide if it was a internal or external source? Who would pay now if debris causes damage?
Interesting to see the Space Force now mentioned and following the Wikipedia list[1] the standard procedure seem to be to create a new agency every couple of decades which takes over the previous one but with a new name. What are the reasons for this?
> Interesting to see the Space Force now mentioned and following the Wikipedia list[1] the standard procedure seem to be to create a new agency every couple of decades which takes over the previous one but with a new name. What are the reasons for this?
Is it a "standard operating procedure" if there are only two examples of it happening (and independent space forces in general)?
In any case, even for those that still aren't fully independent, it seems to be slowly separating air and space forces as space became a bigger player in the global arms race.
You're largely correct. Space has become a more important domain which is growing all of the time. There had been a complaint within the USAF hierarchy and in the government as a whole that the USAF had neglected the space mission. It's leadership was overwhelmingly representatives by those from it's fighter wings. Space was a command within the USAF, but was stifled in both budget and representation. The stars finally aligned for it to be broken off. While it still resides within the Department of the Air Force (similar to how the Marines are within the Department of the Navy), it's CO reports directly to the President and they are budgeted separately through Congress.
Boeing R&D and manufacturing is completely separated which is probably a significant source of problems for them. Often manufacturing is moved to locations that gives tax breaks and other benefits.
Meanwhile Airbus R&D engineers in Toulouse and Hamburg are often less than a 5 minute walk from where their designs are being manufactured.
I was not familiar with the term satellite bus. I kind of guessed what it is but not really. Here's the link to the Wikipedia page. There might be a link to the Boeing bus in there.
I know the Boeing connection is the most "sexy" cause, so people are probably going to run with it anyway, but I also have to wonder about a space debris collision. GEO is already quite polluted, and the "graveyard orbits" commonly used have been shown to be inadequate.[1]
Can anyone tell whether (at 60 degrees East and at 4:30 UTC October 19) the satellite was passing through the intersection with the main plane of lunar perturbed debris? This would hint at a possible debris strike.
Sadly I can't seem to find a 3D satellite visualization that lets you go back in time. :-(
Maybe. But it's probably just Boeing :) This was a fairly young satellite, launched in 2016, and beset with propulsion problems from the start. It was also the second of a new series, and the first one has already failed as well.
Cherry on top that propulsion issues are now problematic for Boeing satellites AND capsules. I wonder if there's a crossover in personnel in either engineering or management.
You joke, but it absolutely should. Boeing is a great example of "when all you have is a hammer, everything is a nail". When MBAs are left in charge with no guardrails, this is what can happen. That's a great thing to teach to new MBAs. Every field has this potential pitfall. When you hyperfocus, bad things can happen. Know when to say when.
The only counter to the money argument is tough regulation that results in jail time. If the whiners can point to an example of white collar criminal enforcement their complaints suddenly have teeth.
Highly optimized systems are fragile. They work well so long as everything stays the same. Optimizing for cost will compromise other things. Quality is not a varnish to be applied after you make something, it's designed into the product and production process from the beginning - by people who understand such things.
If you get your MBA at Emory University, you learn about the New Coke fiasco. In a building named after Roberto C. Goizueta. The Coke executive responsible for New Coke. I suspect the irony is often lost on the latest cadre of MBA grads.
But is the moral of the story that the guys that made the bad decisions got their bonuses and moved on, and aren’t affected by the aftermath? That’s what I fear the MBA’s will learn - don’t stick around.
>They should teach it in every MBA program in the country /s.
As if it wasn't the result of what has been taught for decades, now coming of age more bigly than ever ;)
>MBA programs should be reformed from the ground up.
Who would do the reforming though?
Academic leaders? That could be like having the inmates running the asylum :)
From the ground up?
If you're not careful they could end up building an insane new institution at a massive scale in an image grandiose enough that it could crush GE or something ;)
If you gave a company over to only engineers, it would also fail, just in a different way. Same with only HR, or any other field. MBAs are not the problem. Shitty MBAs and shitty leadership are the problem. MBAs aren't there to screw people over; they're there to sustainably run a company. Sure, the bad ones screw people over in the name of nickel-and-diming. But still.
No doubt about it, the widespread problem is having non-leaders in leadership positions.
The underlying defect is a system which allows absolutely poor performers to advance based on an overwhelming focus on greed and ambition for power.
When it has become more popularly acceptable to allow it to become so.
The most unsuitable candidates for leading people are what the mainstream finds acceptable or even desirable once the culture shift swings this far.
With either a reduced number of key positions that can afford to be occupied by a dud (or worse), or an increased number of limited-ability competitors prevailing on the basis of their dedication to leveraging greed and even treachery, the kind of leader that's really needed is less likely to advance from entry-level at all.
What would really help would be a culture that inhibits those unsuitable individuals from arising toward those limited number of key positions to begin with.
If engineers run the restaurant the food is excellent but the menu is confusing and there are no customers because nobody knows the restaurant exists.
If sales/marketing runs the restaurant it's full but there is no food. The menu is beautiful and shows all kinds of dishes nobody knows how to make.
If MBAs run the restaurant it's full of people paid to be there long enough to be counted and reported up to the investors and the food is purchased from the McDonalds next door and relabeled and resold at 3X the price. Nobody will ever come back but it doesn't matter. The metrics from this exercise are used to raise money to open three more restaurants across the street from convenient sources of cheap fast food. This novel model of running restaurants is written up in Harvard Business Review as an excellent example of an arbitrage business model.
If artists run the restaurant they make and eat the food themselves and then leave.
I think this makes a pretty good stereotype based on reality.
This is something of a dichotomy between engineering-based structures and sales-centric, with MBA's and designers as collateral players.
Everybody needs sales of some kind, but most businesses do not actually need "engineering", so there are not usually any engineers expected to in the chain-of-command. Even in an engineering company itself there may be only token members in the most critical decision-making positions.
A sales hierarchy sells from a select source of technology.
An engineering hierarchy selects a technology to be a source of.
They each have huge pallettes to choose from, but they are different.
I think many lifelong business operators are aware that it really takes far more years to truly learn their business than it would to enroll as a freshman and end up earning an MBA.
And that's not even engineering companies.
These are the kind of organizations that may have no worthwhile use for even the most talented decision-maker of any kind regardless of degree, until after their employment has been lengthy enough to have achieved the working acumen that is really necessary. In many cases taking far more years on active duty than in academic preparation, but it's worth it.
But even if you can do without MBA's forever, you still have to have Production, Sales, accountants, HR, Admin, security, IT, etc. You can only go so far with "engineers" only.
However, in one way to approach an ideal "engineering company" the entire chain-of-command consists of true technical leaders-by-consensus top-to-bottom in a Maslow-like way where by nature less consensus is needed toward the top where the individual vision finally becomes most powerful.
All the other departments report to this engineering backbone in one way or another so the buck always stops with somebody who can handle the engineering calculus and who always puts that kind of thing foremost from day one, without undue reliance on business calculus, which are two different pursuits to an extent.
Then if a gifted MBA or two have something to offer, they can do so while reporting to the appropriate engineers, never the other way around.
You need to get back to a more technically talented chain-of-command where they instinctively can make way more money through technology than any bean-counters would ever be able to save even if they laid everyone off.
No doubt you can accomplish a lot by having a completely non-technical chain-of-command, with engineering off to the side like other essentials such as accounting or HR. People do it all the time. But you can't really accomplish quite the same things after all.
Still it sounds like any customers who stumbled in to the "Engineering Restaurant" end up with the best as far as the food itself, although there is some "Artisan Dining" where the experience can be unforgettable too.
Sometimes you don't get much on your plate though, I wondered if they were in the back eating most of it themselves ;)
Intel under Andy Grove, Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes, Boeing under Muilenburg, and Nokia under Kallasvuo had various business issues under an engineer CEO.
From TFA, this bird is the 2nd in this "next generation" of satellites. The first one also failed because either "a meteoroid impact or a wiring flaw that led to an electrostatic discharge following heightened solar weather activity."
That's a pretty specific flaw to then just write it off to a meteor.
So they are 0 for 2. Does not instill confidence in this "next generation" at all.
The linked article shows a picture of the debris. Just amazing that we can do this for tiny objects that 35,000 km away from us, but apparently it's something that can even be done by amateurs: it's 'just' a matter of keeping the exposure time long enough.
There are commercial services that keep visual track of geostationary satellites. A couple of years ago, IIRC, a Russian satellite broke down and there were pictures of the disintegration.
It's more likely that something energetic happened with an onboard system (propulsion or batteries). Could just be leaky valves causing propellant and oxidizer to meet somewhere they shouldn't..
It's had a few propulsion system issues:
> On 9 September 2016, Intelsat announced that due to a malfunction in the LEROS-1c primary thruster, it would require more time for orbit rising ...
> In August 2017, another propulsion issue appeared, leading to larger-than-expected propellant usage to control the satellite attitude during the north/south station keeping maneuvers. This issue reduced the orbital life-time by about 3.5 years.
It's anyways possible that it was struck by a meteorite or a piece of space debris that's too small to be tracked.
But these satellites also carry fuel for orbit keeping, evasion manoeuvres and going to a graveyard orbit at its end of life. Given that this satellite had two separate propulsion issues and Intelsat-29e suffered from electrostatic discharge it's not difficult to imagine the satellite igniting its fuel in an uncontrolled manner
Could be struck by a micrometeorite, or if they were doing a station keeping maneuver something could have gone wrong with a thruster. (Apparently the first in it's class Intelsat-29e was lost due to a fuel leak, so maybe there is something systemically wrong in the spacecraft bus.)
There's a lot of stored energy in satellites: fuel, gas pressurizers, batteries. End-of-life geosynchronous satellites sometimes drain all of these, deliberately, to limit their hazard as space junk.
An accidental strike is unlikely. Either a massive malfunction, or maybe ASAT [1]. ASAT is always going to be a possibility from now on simply because the target might prefer to deny getting hit.
Lots of real estate between "might prefer to deny it" and "untraceable." On HN at least, you should assume the best possible interpretation instead of putting words into mouths.
And yes, malfunction is the most likely cause, distantly followed by attack. Micrometeoroid isn't very likely IMO, considering Intelsat-29e failed similarly. Unless maybe if they painted a red target on it and the meteor god has a sense of humor.
> “believe it is unlikely that the satellite will be recoverable.”
Why do these announcements have to be so hedgy? The satellite is in twenty pieces, I'd think that with the probability of spontaneous reconstruction being so low, we're fairly safe to say "will not be recoverable".
Is it only in 20 pieces, or did 20 pieces break off? Sudden unscheduled disassembly can happen differently. The probability is that there are 20 pieces they are able to track and many many more pieces that are smaller
"The Russian government’s disclosure of the Ekran 2 battery explosion on 25 June 1978 is the first known fragmentation in geostationary orbit."
There are two other geostationary fragmentations in the list, Ekran 4 and Ekran 9. These two events are hypothesized to have also been due to battery explosions.
With falling cost of launch, there seems an opportunity to have a program to clean up orbital debris, funded by insurance premiums for orbits that don't self clean (like GEO).
Things can be both - insurance fraud jumps to mind, for example. You have to make the insurance company whole (they sue you in civil court) and you have to stand trial for your alleged crime (you're arraigned in criminal court).
> ... satellite maker Boeing to address an anomaly that emerged earlier that day, but “believe it is unlikely that the satellite will be recoverable.”
Yeah, the satellite disintegrates and they call it an "anomaly" and "unlikely that the satellite will be recoverable". This response is even funnier than "the front fell off" sketch.
I feel like it's time to class Boeing as not only inept but a dangerously inept organisation.
> Who is going to pay the day SpaceX has a "whoops" ?
Ironically, SpaceX is probably one of the least bad companies in that regard.
1. They launch satellites to a very low LEO orbit. The satellites use their onboard thrusters to get to their final orbits. This means that satellites that malfunction early in their life (the first lip of the bathtub[1]) deorbit in a matter of months. And they're so low, they don't affect anyone else.
2. And even Starlink satellites that do fail are at such a low orbital height that they'll spontaneously deorbit in 5-10 years.
