Billion dollar government satellite explodes

[Legend]

Was launched yesterday by SpaceX. No one knows anything but the launch seems good. Maybe the sat failed to release from the rocket.

Or it is ok and the gov wants it to be ignored so they are misleading people. The sat had a really odd launch leadup.

[DD_Bwest]

wait wtf zuma exploded?!?

edit:   went to NSF,  soudns like the payload adapter failure?   i remember hearing spacex get a congrats on a succesfull launch,  and i remember geting the fairing seperation confirmation on hte webcast.   this is all very odd, and since its classified we will probably never know..

[Legend]

wait wtf zuma exploded?!?

I learned about it from this meme  



I could easily see this being fake. Make it so the satellite isn't reflective and can't be tracked that easily. Have it detach from the second stage and go off and do its own thing. Then claim it went down with the second stage so that no trackers are surprised they didn't observe the satellite separating. Gov did something even more elaborate with a satellite in 1990, even making it have a fake explosion apparently.

Or it really failed to detach and the gov didn't want it landing with any secretes intact and quickly agreed to deorbit it while stage 2 still was opporational. ZUMA was put on the adaptor and encased in fairings by the gov instead of spacex and they could have made any sort of mistake.

[Legend]

Still very odd. SpaceX released a statement saying the Falcon 9 did the mission 100% correctly. We also have citizen footage of fairing seperation and second stage de-orbit confirming they happened at the correct times.

So it can be assumed a fact that ZUMA did reach orbit and the news stating otherwise is wrong. Maybe the sources are wrong or maybe the writers misunderstood. Either way it just makes things more confusing.


Edt: I'm moving into team fake. If the sat was still on stage 2, it would have increased the weight needed for the deorbit burn. So since people saw stage 2 pump out leftover fuel after the burn, we'd know ZUMA wasn't there or was super light. Also this leaked super fast for being something so secret.

Option 1: ZUMA reached orbit but failed to seperate from the second stage. Instead of trying to save ZUMA and look into options, the gov decided within 2 hours to procede with the planned deorbit of 2nd stage and make sure ZUMA landed in the ocean.

Option 2: ZUMA did seperate and then its thrusters failed, or it had another problem and was deorbited on purpose.

Option 3: the leaked info is wrong and the sat is still in space or it wasn't a sat and did its mission.