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Intelsat 33e breaks up in geostationary orbit

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Re: Intelsat 33e breaks up in geostationary orbit

#71

Post by blkhawk »

Tepix wrote: post #40
naikrovek wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They're physically hundreds of kilometers apart. That’s pretty close when your neighbor just exploded and there’s almost exactly zero air resistance to prevent debris from reaching you.

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?

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.

Re: Intelsat 33e breaks up in geostationary orbit

#72

Post by randmeerkat »

ben_w wrote: post #38
naikrovek wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They're physically hundreds of kilometers apart. That’s pretty close when your neighbor just exploded and there’s almost exactly zero air resistance to prevent debris from reaching you.

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.

> 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.

Source?

Re: Intelsat 33e breaks up in geostationary orbit

#73

Post by panki27 »

Aachen wrote: post #60
bryanlarsen wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

My KSP experience supports your view :)

Parts that were sped up have their opposite orbital side raised, parts that got slowed will have their opposite orbital side lowered.

Re: Intelsat 33e breaks up in geostationary orbit

#74

Post by Aachen »

nordsieck wrote: post #18
matrix2003 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

> 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

Re: Intelsat 33e breaks up in geostationary orbit

#75

Post by nordsieck »

ck2 wrote: post #35

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" ?

> 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.

---

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathtub_curve

Re: Intelsat 33e breaks up in geostationary orbit

#76

Post by panki27 »

wpm wrote: post #56
deskr wrote: post #7

> ... 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 organi…

Well what sort of engineering standards are these satellites built to? Boeing: Oh, very rigorous aerospace engineering standards. What sort of thing? Boeing: Well, the front’s not supposed to explode for a start.

No minimum crew requirement, though.

Re: Intelsat 33e breaks up in geostationary orbit

#77

Post by lupusreal »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #43
nordsieck wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like WGS-10 is the closest. 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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA-291

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.

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.

Re: Intelsat 33e breaks up in geostationary orbit

#78

Post by ethbr1 »

anjel wrote: post #64
ben_w wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Wouldn't debris at the same address (after some time) therefore have zero relative motion?

Re: Intelsat 33e breaks up in geostationary orbit

#79

Post by api »

baud147258 wrote: post #51
psunavy03 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. And no, I'm not an MBA . . .

> If you gave a company over to only engineers, it would also fail, just in a different way Do you have an idea of what would be the failure mode(s)?

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.

Re: Intelsat 33e breaks up in geostationary orbit

#80

Post by a1369209993 »

randmeerkat wrote: post #72
ben_w wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. Source?

  $ units
  You have: 25m2 / 2tau(700km)^2
  You want: /billion
    * 0.0040600751
    / 246.30086
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