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Elon Musk: 'If we are successful in this, it is game over for all the other heavy lift rockets'
by Kevin Loria
Feb. 5, 2018
Business Insider

If SpaceX's  Falcon Heavy launch on Tuesday is successful, CEO Elon Musk thinks the success will blow away the competition for launching heavy loads into space.

"If we are successful in this, it is game over for all the other heavy lift rockets," Musk said Monday evening on a press call.

The first launch is scheduled for 1:30 p.m. on Tuesday and will be  broadcast live. If it succeeds, the system will not only be cheaper than any other operational heavy launch vehicle, but it'll also be the most powerful (some retired rockets, like the Saturn V, were more powerful).

Musk believes that if the Falcon Heavy can successfully get  its very cool payload into space, it will no longer make sense to use other vehicles certified for  heavy lift launches, like the Delta IV Heavy, Russia's Proton, or Europe's Ariane 5. That's because of the same reason SpaceX's other rockets are already revolutionizing the business of getting to space — it's a lot cheaper to reuse the rocket boosters that propel something out of Earth's gravity well than to use new ones every time.

The  Falcon Heavy has three boosters attached to each Falcon 9 rocket, and SpaceX has become quite good at recovering them for refurbishment and reuse. Other existing launch systems can't recycle their boosters.

Future competitors, however, like  Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin, do plan on  using reusable rockets, matching SpaceX with that crucial capability.

The Falcon Heavy isn't the only high-powered rocket SpaceX has in the works — the company is also working on a system known  as the BFR, which it plans to certify for crewed missions. Musk said it was designed to be reused more quickly than the Falcon Heavy.

If SpaceX wanted to make Falcon Heavy even more powerful, according to Musk, the company could bring up the power pretty close to that of the Saturn V, the most powerful rocket in history. That's because Falcon Heavy essentially takes the Falcon 9 system, which SpaceX has now launched and landed quite a few times, and adds two identical first-stage boosters (which provide most of the rocket's thrust) to the sides of the central booster, cranking up the power.

"We could really dial it up to as much performance as anyone could ever want. If we wanted to, we could actually add two more side boosters and make it Falcon Super Heavy ... I think we can crank up thrust and probably get upwards of 9 million pounds of thrust," Musk said on the press call.

For now, it appears unnecessary for SpaceX to make a rocket that powerful. It would need extra testing and provide more power than what planned future Falcon Heavy missions would require.

With launch  scheduled for Tuesday and weather looking good, there's still a lot that could go wrong.

"It will be a real huge downer if it blows up, but ... if something goes wrong, hopefully it goes wrong far into the mission so we at least learn as much as possible along the way," Musk told Business Insider's space correspondent, Dave Mosher, on the call. "I'll be happy, I'll consider it a win if it clears the pad and doesn't blow the pad to smithereens."

If Falcon Heavy blows up the launchpad, rebuilding will take nine months to a year, Musk said. There are still plenty of ways for it to fail once it gets off the ground — the structure could be torn apart by supersonic shockwaves or the side boosters may not separate, since that system has never been tested, for example — but at that point, SpaceX could probably launch another Falcon Heavy within a few months.

A successful flight would prove that at least the initial design works. Musk seems hopeful.

"I'm sure we've done everything we could do to maximize the chance of success for this mission," he said.

"It's either going to be an exciting success or an exciting failure — one big boom. So I'd say tune in," Musk said. "It's going to be worth your time."

http://www.businessinsider.com/falcon-h … ors-2018-2

[Excerpt]

First Falcon Heavy launch blends SpaceX style, raw power and the unknown
February 5, 2018 Stephen Clark
Spaceflight Now.com

The Falcon Heavy will dispatch the Roadster — weighing around 2,760 pounds (1,250 kilograms) on the street — with enough velocity to escape Earth’s gravitational bonds, reaching a maximum speed of around 7 miles per second (11 kilometers per second; 24,600 mph).

The sports car will go into a “precessing Earth-Mars elliptical orbit around the sun,” SpaceX officials wrote in the mission’s press kit. The orbit will stretch beyond Mars’ average distance from the sun.

“We expect it’ll get about 400 million kilometers away from Earth, maybe 250 to 270 million miles, and be doing 11 kilometers per second,” Musk told reporters Monday. “It’s going to be in a precessing elliptical orbit, with one part of the ellipse being at Earth orbit the other part being at Mars orbit, so it’ll essentially be an Earth-Mars cycler.

“We estimate it’ll be in that orbit for several hundred million years, maybe in excess of a billion years. At times, it will come extremely close to Mars, and there’s a tiny, tiny chance that it will hit Mars,” he said.

Asked if SpaceX has quantified the chance of the Roadster impacting Mars, Musk replied: “Extremely tiny. I wouldn’t hold your breath.”

The Tesla Roadster’s weight and dimensions fall well under the Falcon Heavy’s capacity, and would not stress the lift capability of SpaceX’s smaller, single-core Falcon 9 rocket or Atlas, Delta and Ariane boosters operated by rivals United Launch Alliance and Arianespace.

The iconography surrounding Tuesday’s test launch has captured attention, but star of the show will be the Falcon Heavy itself, set to become the world’s most powerful launcher currently in service.

Comprised of three rocket booster cores derived from SpaceX’s operational Falcon 9 rocket, plus a single-engine upper stage, the Falcon Heavy can generate 5.1 million pounds of thrust in future configurations. On Tuesday’s demo flight, the average thrust from the Falcon Heavy’s 27 kerosene-fueled Merlin 1D engines will be throttled back to 92 percent power, equivalent to roughly 4.7 million pounds, Musk said.

That will surpass the European Ariane 5 launcher, the world’s leader in liftoff power at 2.9 million pound of thrust from two segmented solid rocket boosters and a core engine. SpaceX’s new rocket will produce more thrust than any launch vehicle since the space shuttle, and its power at liftoff — approximately the same thrust as 18 Boeing 747 jumbo jets — will come in fourth among rockets all time, after the Soviet Union’s N1 moon rocket, which never had a fully successful flight, NASA’s Saturn 5 launcher that carried astronauts to the moon, Russia’s 1980s-era Energia rocket and the space shuttle.

The Falcon Heavy will also be able to carry more payload into orbit than any other rocket in the world — and the most by any launcher since the Saturn 5 — a more important measure of the rocket’s lifting capacity.

The Delta 4-Heavy rocket, the most capable rocket in service today in terms of lift capacity, can haul up to 62,540 pounds (28,370 kilograms) to a low-altitude orbit approximately 120 miles (200 kilometers) above Earth when launched to the east from Cape Canaveral, according to a launch vehicle data sheet published by ULA.

NASA’s planned Space Launch System, set for a maiden flight in late 2019 or early 2020, will carry more than 154,000 pounds (70,000 kilograms) to low Earth orbit and produce a maximum thrust of 8.8 million pounds. A souped-up model of the SLS with an enlarged upper stage launching in the early 2020s could haul more than 230,000 pounds (105 metric tons) to low Earth orbit.

The SLS is being designed with surplus space shuttle engine and booster components, and the space agency intends to use the multibillion-dollar mega-rocket to send astronaut crews to the moon, and eventually beyond.

When its first stage boosters are not recovered, SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy will be capable of delivering up to 140,660 pounds (63,800 kilograms) to low Earth orbit when launched to the east from Florida’s Space Coast, where rockets get a velocity boost from Earth’s rotation.

But SpaceX intends to land all three first stage boosters on the Falcon Heavy, eating into the rocket’s propellant reserves and reducing the weight it can loft into orbit.

A Falcon Heavy rocket flight sells commercially for around $90 million, according to SpaceX’s website. But a mission for NASA or the U.S. military, which levy additional requirements on their launch providers, is expected to go for $150 million or more.

A mission using ULA’s Delta 4-Heavy rocket costs at least twice that. A Delta 4-Heavy launch contract for NASA’s Parker Solar Probe awarded in 2015 was valued at $389 million.

Musk predicted the first Falcon Heavy has a 50 to 70 percent chance of full success, but the final outcome of Tuesday’s test flight will only be known more than six hours after liftoff.

“There’s so much that can go wrong here,” Musk told CBS News. “There are a lot of experts out there saying there’s no way you can do 27 engines, all at the same time, and not have something go wrong.

“You’ve got the booster-to-booster interaction, acoustics and vibration that haven’t been seen from any man-made device in a long time,” Musk said.

The Soviet-era N1 rocket had 30 engines, but Russian engineers had trouble getting all of the powerplants to work in unison. Engine vibrations, turbopump failures and fuel leaks led to four failed launch attempts.

By comparison, the Saturn 5 had five larger first stage engines.

Built at SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California, the Falcon Heavy will encounter intense structural loads as it climbs to the east from the Kennedy Space Center and exceeds the speed of sound. The moment of maximum aerodynamic pressure, known as Max-Q, will be a major stress point.

The Falcon Heavy’s core stage was manufactured specifically for the test flight. Engineers stiffened the center core to take the loads of a Falcon Heavy launch.

The two side boosters were refurbished and modified after launching two earlier Falcon 9 flights, sending the Thaicom 8 communications satellite and a space station-bound cargo capsule toward orbit in May and July of 2016.

“Around Max-Q, that’s where the force on the rocket is the greatest, and that’s possibly where it could fail as well,” Musk said. “We’re a bit worried about ice potentially falling off the upper stage onto the nose cones of the side boosters. That could be coming like a cannon ball through the nose cones.”

“We’ve done all the (computer) modeling we could think of,” Musk told CBS News. “We’ve asked … third parties to double check the calculations, make sure we haven’t made any mistakes. So, we’re not aware of any issues, nobody has been able to point out any fundamental issues. In theory it should work. But where theory and reality collide, reality wins.”

The Falcon Heavy’s twin boosters will cut off their engines and fall away from the rocket around two-and-a-half minutes after liftoff, a separation sequence that has also never been tested in flight. The core stage, operating a lower throttle setting to conserve propellant and burn longer, will continue firing its nine engines until T+plus 3 minutes, 4 seconds.

“If it clears the pad and hopefully makes it throgh transonic and Max-Q, and the boosters are able to separate, it’s a more normal regime,” Musk said. “It becomes like a Falcon 9 at that point.”

The upper stage’s single Merlin engine will fire three times on Tuesday’s mission, continuing the demo flight’s experiments well after liftoff.

Meanwhile, the Falcon Heavy’s two strap-on boosters will flip around to fly tail-first with the aid of cold-gas nitrogen thrusters. Some of the engines on each booster will reignite for “boostback” and “entry” maneuvers to aim for two adjacent touchdown zones at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station around 9 miles (13 kilometers) south of pad 39A.

Like the Falcon 9’s first stage, the boosters will unfurl grid fins for added stability.

Twin sonic booms will crack across the spaceport as the boosters return to Cape Canaveral for staggered landings, slowed with the help of rocket thrust.

The rocket’s center core will head for touchdown on SpaceX’s drone ship positioned downrange in the Atlantic Ocean, with landing expected at T+plus 8 minutes, 19 seconds, approximately 20 seconds after the boosters arrive back on the ground at Cape Canaveral.

The second stage engine will shut down to conclude its first burn at around T+plus 8 minutes, 31 seconds. Another 30-second firing is programmed to start at T+plus 28 minutes, 22 seconds, to send the upper stage, its Tesla cargo and “Starman” into an orbit that ranges to a peak altitude tens of thousands of miles above Earth.

But the mission will not be over.

The rocket will keep flying, soaring through the Van Allen radiation belts before its engine reignites around six hours later for a departure maneuver into interplanetary space.

Musk said the extreme cold and radiation will present hazards during the six-hour coast, which is twice as long as any profile followed by a Falcon 9 rocket in the past.

“Even once we reach orbit we’ve got a very long coast, we’ve got a six-hour coast before restart, which is twice as long as we’ve ever coasted a stage, so we could see the fuel potentially freeze, because it’s out there in deep space, and when it’s not facing the sun it’s at three degrees above absolute zero,” Musk told CBS News. “So it could easily freeze, or the liquid oxygen could boil off, so there’s a lot that could go wrong.”

The upper stage “will actually be in a far worse radiation environment than deep space for several hours, survive that, and then re-light for the trans-Mars injection,” he said.

Long-duration upper stage flight profiles are required for the most demanding U.S. military launch missions, such as the placement of satellites directly into geostationary orbit, a circular perch more than 22,000 miles (nearly 36,000 kilometers) over the equator. Multiple, perfectly-timed engine burns are needed to move from an initial low-altitude inclined parking orbit into such a high-altitude equatorial position.

The lengthy upper stage flight Tuesday will try to demonstrate the Falcon rocket family’s capability to pull off such a feat, showcasing the performance to the Air Force and other prospective customers.

Musk said the upper stage carries additional battery power and pressurant gas for the extra operating time in space.

Musk unveiled the Falcon Heavy rocket in 2011, and proclaimed then the launcher would be ready for blastoff in 2013. SpaceX said it slowed development of the Falcon Heavy to focus on other projects, including the recovery of Falcon 9 rocket stages for reuse, and to resolve technical problems that destroyed two Falcon 9 rockets in 2015 and 2016, one in flight and another on the launch pad.

Musk announced in September his updated vision for settling Mars — SpaceX’s ultimate mission — and announced that his company is working on a giant new rocket dubbed the BFR that could send cargo and crew ships to the red planet, or perhaps the moon if a lunar base becomes reality.

SpaceX developed the Falcon Heavy to lift heavier payloads into space than the company’s Falcon 9 rocket, and to compete with other heavy-lifters for contracts to haul massive spacecraft for the U.S. military and NASA. The Falcon Heavy may also find a niche in deploying large commercial satellites, or launching clusters of smaller spacecraft to support the build-out of planned broadband communications networks.

“This rocket’s great for a lot of reasons,” Musk told CBS News. “It’s something that I think inspires the public. I’ve been asked, is this like Apollo? I’d say it’s not Apollo, but it’s arguably a prelude to a new Apollo, and it’s going to be the only heavy to super-heavy lift rocket in the world. This will be more than twice the thrust and capability of any other rocket currently flying. And if it reaches orbit, it will have the most payload of any rocket since the Saturn 5.

“You could actually send people back to the moon with the Falcon Heavy. You could, with orbital refueling, send people to Mars,” he said. “We think probably our next design, the BFR, is going to be ideal for interplanetary colonization and for establishing a large base on the moon and a city on Mars,” he said. “But this is a prelude to that. This is going to teach us a lot about what’s necessary to have a huge booster with a crazy number of engines.

“We finally have a major advancement in rocketry … I’m not sure whether this will be lost on people, whether they’ll appreciate it,” he said. “I hope they do, because the era of the very large rocket went away with Saturn 5 and with the space shuttle. I find it odd that the Falcon Heavy is twice the thrust of anything from Russia, China, Boeing, Lockheed or Europe. And I hope it encourages them to raise their sights.”

Going into Tuesday’s test flight, only three Falcon Heavy missions are confirmed in SpaceX’s backlog after the test launch: Two for commercial telecom companies Arabsat and ViaSat, and one for the Air Force. Another company, Inmarsat, has an option to launch a future satellite on a Falcon Heavy.

Some customers that reserved launches on SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket switched their satellites to the smaller Falcon 9, which benefited from multiple thrust and performance upgrades to carry some payloads that originally required the triple-core rocket.

Inmarsat and Intelsat had planned launches on the Falcon Heavy, but both ended up flying their satellites on the Falcon 9. The ViaSat 2 satellite built to provide high-speed Internet access across the United States was supposed to launch on a Falcon Heavy, but the firm move its launch to a European Ariane 5 rocket, citing schedule worries. ViaSat retained its contract with SpaceX to launch a future satellite on a Falcon Heavy.

Musk told CBS News he was “giddy” on the eve of the Falcon Heavy’s first blastoff.

“I thought for sure something would delay us, we could have some issue we discovered on the rocket or maybe bad weather,” Musk said in a conference call with reporters Monday afternoon. “But the weather’s looking good, the rocket’s looking good, so it should be an exciting day. I’m looking forward to it.

“We’ll have a good time no matter what happens. It’s guaranteed to be exciting, one way or another. It’s either going to be an exciting success or an exciting failure. One big boom! I’d say tune in, it’s going to be worth your time.”

But he’s hopeful for success.

“We’ve done everything we can,” Musk said. “I’m sure we’ve done everything we could do to maximize the chances of success of this mission. I think once you’ve done everything you can think of and it still goes wrong, well, there’s nothing you could have done. But I feel at peace with that.”

https://spaceflightnow.com/2018/02/05/f … e-unknown/

Click on this Youtube link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tk338VX … ubs_digest

[Excerpt]

Jason Davis • February 1, 2018
Preview: Succeed or fail, SpaceX's Falcon Heavy test sure to be a blast
The Planetary Society

At long last, SpaceX is ready to send its mythical Falcon Heavy rocket on a test flight next week. It's a huge deal, even for a spaceflight company that routinely accomplishes huge deals. An operational Falcon Heavy will make SpaceX the proud owner of the most powerful rocket system since the Saturn V*, and opens up yet another corner of the launch industry to serious competition.

The main goal of the test flight is straightforward: launch something into space without blowing up. CEO Elon Musk, never one to settle for something boring like an inert block of concrete, decided the sacrificial payload would be his Tesla Roadster, aimed for a Mars-adjacent trajectory.

"I love the thought of a car drifting apparently endlessly through space and perhaps being discovered by an alien race millions of years in the future," he said on Twitter.

I'll break down the Tesla aspect of the launch in a followup story coming out Monday, and I'll also be in Florida covering the launch in person. My boss, Planetary Society CEO Bill Nye, is scheduled to make an appearance at the Kennedy Space Center visitor's center. The first launch window opens Tuesday, February 6 at 1:30 p.m. ET (18:30 UT).

So, about that rocket

The Falcon Heavy is essentially three of the company's Falcon 9 rockets bolted together in a row, a design that makes it outwardly similar to United Launch Alliance's Delta IV Heavy. For those not up-to-date on SpaceX nomenclature, "Falcon” is an homage to the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars, and "Heavy" simply means the rocket can carry heavy things to space.

SpaceX revealed the Falcon Heavy in 2011, predicting it would fly as early as late 2013. Musk is known for his ambitious timelines, and it turned out the rocket's design was more difficult to perfect than originally thought. Initially, SpaceX considered equipping the Heavy with a complicated propellant crossfeed system, in which the two side boosters re-fill the center booster as the rocket ascends. When the side boosters are empty, they drop away, leaving the center core with a full fuel tank. This ultimately makes the rocket more efficient.

The crossfeed feature ended up being too complex, but even without it, the Falcon Heavy was a challenge to bring to fruition. Whereas the Delta IV Heavy has just one engine for each of its three boosters, the Falcon Heavy has nine, for a grand total of 27 engines that must all ignite and work in tandem without tearing the rocket apart. SpaceX's two disasters in 2015 and 2016 delayed things further: the 2016 accident damaged the company's only launch pad, Space Launch Complex 40, forcing SpaceX to rush to get pad 39A operational. But since there's a chance the Heavy flight will end in disaster and damage pad 39A, SpaceX also needed to get pad 40 operational again.

There's actually a further bit of controversy surrounding this point. Only pad 39A is outfitted for crew flights, which are expected to start later this year (an ambitious timeline, according to the Government Accountability Office). Should the Falcon Heavy damage 39A, how will that affect NASA's commercial crew program, which has been waiting to launch astronauts from American soil since 2011? It's a fair question, and you can bet NASA officials will be watching this demo flight with clenched teeth.

On December 28, 2017, SpaceX raised the Falcon Heavy demo rocket into position at pad 39A for the very first time, and following a month of tests and tweaks, conducted a static fire on January 24.

SpaceX's website pegs the cost of a Falcon Heavy at $90 million. That number will get repeated a lot as the demo flight draws closer, so it's important to note it comes with some caveats. Buying a rocket is a little like buying a car: extra trim levels and extended warranties add up quickly and frequently put you above the starting price.

Case in point: Space Test Program-2 (STP-2), the Air Force launch that will carry multiple payloads to three different orbits, including The Planetary Society's LightSail 2 spacecraft. The Air Force will actually end up paying SpaceX a maximum of $160.9 million for that launch, depending on the completion of various milestones leading to launch, including mission success.

Here's why. First of all, there's oversight. The government requires its rocket providers to present lots of reviews as launch preparations progress. At those reviews, the provider updates Air Force officers and contracted, subject matter experts from organizations like The Aerospace Corporation on how things are going. If there are problems, deeper investigations may be required.

Secondly, STP-2 is a complex mission. 25 different spacecraft will be deployed into three different orbits. In addition to providing the Falcon Heavy rocket itself, SpaceX is responsible for designing and building the adapters to hold all those spacecraft inside the rocket's payload fairing, and also making sure they get deployed at exactly the right moments.

On STP-2 launch day, the Falcon Heavy will first place 12 satellites into an initial low-Earth orbit, before transferring to a circular, 720-kilometer circular, low-Earth orbit to deploy a constellation of six identical satellites called COSMIC-2, along with five smaller auxiliary payloads. (One of those auxiliary payloads is Prox-1, containing LightSail 2).

Then, the Falcon Heavy upper stage re-ignites and flies to an elliptical, medium-Earth orbit (12,000 by 6,000 kilometers), where it will drop off another spacecraft called DSX. After that, there's an Air Force certification objective to show the upper stage can coast for at least three, and ideally five, hours, before restarting for another five-second burn. To pull all of this off, SpaceX has to carefully configure the Falcon Heavy's flight software and test it to make sure it all works.

Even with all those extra options and requirements, the Falcon Heavy is still cheaper at $160.9 million than its competitors. A Delta IV Heavy flight can cross the $400 million threshold, and SLS will be even more expensive. (At one point NASA was hoping to keep the cost of an SLS flight to about a half-billion dollars, but that estimate has grown—how much depends on who you ask.)

SpaceX now routinely recovers and re-uses its Falcon 9 boosters by either flying them back to land or a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean. For Falcon Heavy, SpaceX plans to recover all three of the Falcon Heavy's booster rockets. All three! The two side boosters will return to Cape Canaveral, and the center core will land on the drone ship Of Course I Still Love You.

There are a variety of possible outcomes for the demo flight: complete success, partial success, total disaster, loss of one or more boosters attempting to return to Earth, and the usual litany of everything that can go wrong during a rocket launch. In any case, it will be quite a thing to see.

If things go completely awry, it's unclear how soon SpaceX would continue marching through its Falcon Heavy manifest. Ultimately the big rocket is an interim solution; SpaceX plans to merge both the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy into a single, larger vehicle called BFR (Big Falcon Rocket, if you want to avoid expletives).

The company has already bounced back from two operational failures of its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, so a disaster for this Falcon Heavy demonstration flight shouldn't be a huge setback—especially considering the low expectations Musk set. The only scenario that could cause the company significant problems would be if the Heavy badly damages the launch infrastructure at pad 39A and delays NASA's commercial crew program.

As far as I know, there's never been a rocket launch where the vehicle provider openly told the public there was a high chance things might end catastrophically. Succeed or fail, the demo flight is sure to be a blast!

Read the full article at:

http://www.planetary.org/blogs/jason-da … eview.html

In 365 days, President Trump has made 2,140 false or misleading claims

The Fact Checker’s ongoing database of the false or misleading claims made by President Trump since assuming office.

Updated Jan. 19, 2018

Here's the list:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics … 8b50f4f782

Industry & Technology/January 29, 2018
Opinion: The Zuma Fiasco
by Michael Weinhoffer/Staff Reporter

That was supposed to be a routine launch for SpaceX on Jan. 8 was anything but that. SpaceX has a much more significant launch very shortly with the debut of the Falcon Heavy, but the most recent launch overshadowed it for a few weeks. The classified mission did not go off too smoothly, and it provided  an opportunity to think about   the disadvantages of such missions.

Northrop Grumman, one of the largest defense contractors in the world, manufactured the payload for this launch. The company produced a spacecraft for the U.S. government, and since SpaceX has become authorized to launch military spacecraft and had flawless flights last year, it makes sense that they chose SpaceX as the launch provider. The only thing special about this flight is that virtually no one knows what the payload is. Someone deep inside the caverns of the Pentagon does, but not even the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), which is responsible for overseeing all classified U.S. satellites, claimed responsibility for the payload, codenamed “Zuma.”

Zuma was supposed to launch on a Falcon 9 on Nov. 15 but was delayed almost two months as the SpaceX team analyzed payload fairing data from a previous customer. The launch on Jan. 8 went off without any problems, and SpaceX routinely landed the first-stage booster back at Cape Canaveral. They did not show live video of the second stage or payload deployment, but this was the custom when they launched other national security payloads. There was no confirmation that the payload made it into orbit by either SpaceX or Northrop Grumman, which was not too surprising, as that is the same routine for U.S. spy satellites.

However, the next day, the Wall Street Journal reported that the satellite failed to reach orbit and plummeted into the Indian Ocean. Congressional staffers and lawmakers informed them of this. Other news outlets concurred with the Wall Street Journal, but SpaceX and Northrop Grumman pushed back. Northrop Grumman said that they do not comment on classified missions; however, SpaceX’s comment was more interesting. Gwynne Shotwell, Chief Operating Officer and President of SpaceX, responding to calls for an explanation, said, “…Falcon 9 did everything correctly on Sunday night…Information published that is contrary to this statement is categorically false…” That is a reasonably strongly worded statement from SpaceX. If the payload did not reach the proper orbit, they surely are not taking any blame for it! It seems rather unlikely that the second stage of the Falcon 9 failed, but that means that the payload did not separate correctly from the rocket. Grumman did provide the payload adapter, which connects the payload to the rocket. That is usually something implemented by the launch provider, which tells me that Zuma was not an ordinary satellite or a satellite at all. If it were, the adapter provided by SpaceX would have suited it well. So maybe the payload adapter failed to release Zuma into orbit. That seems more likely. The consensus became the payload failed to reach its orbit one way or another.

Several news outlets reported that the payload crashed into the Indian Ocean, but a lack of evidence questions that conclusion. At this point, it is just pure speculation. Officials could have easily said that the payload failed to stop questions about its mission. What made things worse was at a Pentagon briefing, where someone asked about whether the precious payload was successful in reaching orbit. The government official taking questions responded by referring questions on the mission back to SpaceX! The launch provider, the payload manufacturer, and the U.S. government all have failed to comment on the status of the mission. I do not recall any space mission that had this level of classification.

So what is Zuma? News channels have called Zuma a “satellite,” and that seems likely because that is the most common payload of any launch, but there are other possibilities. As stated previously, the fact that Northrop Grumman provided the payload adapter themselves makes me think that Zuma is not a satellite. If it were, why not use SpaceX’s extremely reliable adapter? Let’s examine a few possibilities. The Air Force has the X-37B spaceplane, which is not a spy satellite, but rather a mini space shuttle that is conducting scientific experiments while in orbit. Those are classified missions, but it is nothing threatening. Zuma could be an experimental spaceplane like the X-37B, or it could be “something else.” The “something else” option is the most concerning. The only option that I can think of besides a satellite or a spaceplane is a weapons system. Zuma could be a laser weapon or a missile defense system that fires physicals projectiles at Earth.

There are no bans on weapons in outer space, but that does not mean that it is a good idea to put them there. Russia and China have pushed for the U.S. to back a U.N resolution that works to prevent a weapons buildup in outer space. The U.S. has refused, citing definition ambiguity and national security interests. Russia, China, and the U.S. all have tested space weapons and even launched missiles from Earth to destroy satellites in space. Outer space has become a strong military environment, and the question of whether to ban space weapons is still up for debate.

Launching highly classified payloads into outer space does not help those in opposition to the proposed resolution. A vital element of appropriate conduct in outer space is data transparency. Not knowing the purpose of a payload circling the Earth every ninety minutes puts nations on edge, and I am confident that Russia and China are very upset over the Zuma launch. There is no reason for a company such as Grumman to launch payloads with a higher classification than U.S. spy satellites. It is not appropriate conduct, and the U.S. should not repeat it. The United States needs to serve as a model of international cooperation and transparency in outer space, and this mission does not fulfill that standard. Frankly, I hope the payload did fail. I do not want to go to bed at night wondering if the Zuma payload is a threat to international security and the safety of outer space. The Zuma payload is not in the interest of international security and peace that has existed in outer space for more than fifty years and should not have successors.

http://theavion.com/opinion-the-zuma-fiasco/