- cross-posted to:
- space@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- space@lemmy.world
A satellite belonging to multinational service provider Intelsat mysteriously broke up in geostationary orbit over the weekend.
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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.
Wow, Boeing keeps finding new and interesting ways to be incompetent. They seriously need their entire C-suite replaced with engineering types.
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.
To be fair this satellite was built in 2016.
That’s after the merger.
Sorry, I just bought several Boeing stocks at the time they didn’t kill anyone yet, and now they have to do all that stuff to not let me out with a profit
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.
Circunstancial evidence points to Boeing being a failed company.
I didn’t argue if they were a failed company. Been that way a long time IMO.
🎶 It’s not the best choice it’s Spacers Choice!🎶
… 7 Members of Hezbollah Injured.
That brought a legit chuckle!
I’m honestly happy to see that it just had a fuel malfunction instead of the implication of an outside cause…
That was a previous satellite. This one appears to still be unknown if I’m not mistaken.
Makes me wonder if we have some Kessler Syndrome on our hands… 👀👀👀
Probably not. Anyway.
Yeah, blowing up satellites and cutting undersea internet cables would be (a short) prelude to world war III.
I think it would take a lot longer than you expect with those shenanigans, but its still not good yeah.
aliens
Nah it was both
Jack Welch is up there with the guy who invented leaded gasoline and the chemicals that put holes in the ozone.
The door plug again?
did you know that high powered lasers are invisible to the naked eye without a sufficient particulate medium to pass through?
Good thing I’m wearing clothes.
Wouldn’t it be a bit more concerning if it exploded into smaller, yet complete satellites…? Exploding “into pieces” seems downright SOP to me.
I did read about this yesterday, and as far as I know the name of the sat is intelsat 33e and its for communication purposes. I’m curious to know what really happen, how it broke.
It was probably an emergency exit hatch for the magic rocket gas.
It was probably a whistleblower satellite.
That satellite was about to reveal company secrets
The secret is that Boeing is run by criminally careless assholes. Wait, that’s not a secret.
RIP
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.
Their first mistake was building on the BeamNG platform.
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.
Hmm, sounds like Boeing needs to fire more engineers.
And increase C-level compensation, of course.
There really is no other option.
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?
Then we can give bigger bonuses! What a genius idea.
Of course there is! They could spend more money in PR campaigns and bribes lobbying
You need double
tidestildes for the cross out text to work
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…”
And do some more stock buybacks and raise dividends, of course.
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.
Exactly why I wonder where our business school ethics go when it seems to me that value is only placed on what can be tied to everyone’s income and profit being the ‘sole’ provider for it, and any Engineer’s ethics being a nice thing for their own time. What would happen if we switch it up to Engineers being in charge who actually learn to make the product and the business side being the client of it rather than the other way around? Could the world be a better place? This doesn’t mean every engineer or either group as a monolith is good or bad. Just that maybe in economics we can see who may value externalities even in capitalism as Adam Smith seemed to promote over just profit.
An epic pattern my be on the horizon?
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