A satellite belonging to multinational service provider Intelsat mysteriously broke up in geostationary orbit over the weekend.
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.
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
And do some more stock buybacks and raise dividends, of course.
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…”
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?
Their first mistake was building on the BeamNG platform.
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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.
What, was it blowing a whistle?
Man they are just on fire lately
on firerapidly decompressingLol I believe it would be rapid uncontrolled oxidation
Not in space, though?
Did the front fall off?
I guess space is technically out of the environment.
They thought it did … so they tried turning it off then on again … and it exploded.
“Did it pass the smoke test?”
“Kinda… There’s no smoke, anyway…”
That line was really funny. The first time we heard it. Many years ago.
Not my fault it’s still relevant.
You should tow it out of the environment or something.
It’s roughly equivalent to “something something pilot’s balls” in the comments of a video of an aircraft.
A joke that’s been absolutely beaten to death years ago, but people just will not accept it’s run it’s course.
…was designed and manufactured by Boeing Space Systems and launched in 2016. It provided broadband services, including internet and phone communication services, to parts of Europe, Africa, and most of Asia.
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. Intelsat declared the satellite a total loss in April 2019, later attributing it to either a micrometeoroid strike or solar weather activity.
What caused IS-33e to break up in orbit remains unclear, however. Intesalt officials did observe that it was using far more fuel than it should be to maintain its orbit shortly after launching eight years ago, shaving off 3.5 years of its 15-year lifetime.
Could be a coincidence, but I feel “Boeing leaks” approaching “Samsung exploding” levels of memification (where they had washers, phones and some other things all exploding, and the look was not great).
Samsung shook the meme off, but I feel like Boeing will have a harder time.
Samsung makes consumer grade products that are “easily” replaced or fixed. Boeing makes shit for the US military, and they will 100% get what’s coming to them when a Boeing military project spontaneously combusts.
I do sort of feel that Samsung got a bit of a bad rep for their phones exploding because it wasn’t really their fault. The company that made the batteries took shortcuts in the manufacturing process and that’s what caused the fires. If they had followed the instructions Samsung had given them they would have been okay.
Although equally the company wouldn’t have felt the need to take shortcuts if Samsung had made the batteries to a standard design.
Go look up what Samsung started out selling. They make a ton of military shit too just mostly for their own country.
Samsung’s military shit did not explode, their main sources of revenue do not involve the military anymore, and the reason for the explosion was identified and resolved.
Boeing, however, have multiple faults in fields that do deal with the military, this doesn’t end well.
Samsung’s military shit did not explode
Well I should hope its ordnance did. Lol
This is slightly concerning. Satellites don’t tend to explode on their own, but it is a Boeing design with a history of leaky propulsion, so who knows?
Sure it was a Comm satellite for the world’s tensest area, which is about to go to bigger war.
who would have ASAT capability at GEO?
how could it be launched to GEO undetected?
If you’re a government, you can pretty much put anything in a rocket fairing and call it a reconnaissance satellite.
The only warning that actually has to be given is that a rocket is being launched, so you don’t accidentally trigger WW3 by setting off launch detection satellites without warning. After it’s in space, no one can really tell what was in the fairing. Could be a spy satellite, could be navigation. Could just be a box with a bunch of little rockets in it, designed to slam into whatever you want at ridiculous speed.
But it’s way more likely that this was just Boeing having a tiny leak in a propellant tank, or a bad thruster and as soon as the concentration of propellant and oxidizer got high enough, it triggered a detonation. They certainly have a history of not leak testing their shit: airplanes falling apart, space capsules with leaky thrusters, and now a blown up satellite point more towards incompetence than malice.
Is this a trick question? Cause you might as well be asking a 1600s peasant how to develop film.
You burn a witch and pray.
Instructions Unclear : gave my wife Chlamydia.
Boeing killed John Barnett.
True? I think so. Off-topic? Also true.
This is a story about Being. How could it be off topic?
👍
BOEING KILLED JOHN BARNETT
Another Unsafe Product, Brought To You By Boeing!
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. Intelsat declared the satellite a total loss in April 2019, later attributing it to either a micrometeoroid strike or solar weather activity.
What caused IS-33e to break up in orbit remains unclear, however. Intesalt officials did observe that it was using far more fuel than it should be to maintain its orbit shortly after launching eight years ago, shaving off 3.5 years of its 15-year lifetime.
Boeing produces more leaks than this guy:
I was on a Boeing plane the other day that was delayed while we watched a guy with a wrench and a rag trying to stop fuel leaking out of the wing. It wasn’t hugely reassuring.
At least it was outside. Better out than in, I always say
Nowadays when I fly the fiirst criteria when I search for flights I check the airline’s fleet, then price.
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.
Boeing: outsources to an outsourcer who outsources to an outsourcer who outsources to an outsourcer who outsources to an outsourcer and so on and still has the shamelessness of appearing surprised at the shit quality and reliability they deliver
Sounds like that case of the sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-contracted killing in China that one time
That’s gonna leave a mess.
Fortunately, Boeing is a responsible entity and will plan on cleaning it up… right?
I hope not “Gravity” movie levels of mess…
Geostationary orbit is waaaaay high.
I’m not really into the stock market, but I would not buy Boeing at the moment.
Now would be the best time to do it
Assuming it bounces back up
If it doesn’t do it on its own, one of 2 things will happen:
- They get bought out, which almost always results in a bump.
- The government bails them out, which is an even bigger bump.
Their vehicles don’t, so i wouldn’t hold my breath
The doors pop off midflight, now would the best time to hold your breath.
Unless it’s a dead cat moment :)
I don’t think government will let the company fold. The stock will go up not in the short term but over 10-15 years it will surely fly.
Having said than enron is still in the back of the mind.
