Intelsat 33e breaks up in geostationary orbit

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.

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?

Edit: [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_space_forces,_units,...

For some context:

The same Boeing satellite bus already experienced a major issue some years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19658800

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.

Here's an article about that: https://skyandtelescope.org/observing/how-to-see-and-photogr...

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.

How does a satellite break up in orbit? Was it struck by something?

> “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".

I was wondering if a geostationary satellite has ever broken up before. I found a NASA list of satellites that fragmented:

History of On-orbit Satellite Fragmentations, 16th Edition

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20220019160/downloads/HO...

Searching that PDF for "geostationary" I found:

"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).

At least of the bigger debris.

> ... 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.

Privatize the profit, socialize the cleanup costs.

Start making these companies pay into an insurance superfund.

Who is going to pay the day SpaceX has a "whoops" ?

Sure are an awful lot of armchair experts in here.

I assume this is the new Boeing Intelsat MAX-8?