SpaceX denies Falcon rocket caused Zuma mission failure

James Dean
Florida Today
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the government's secret Zuma payload flew from Launch Complex 40 at Canaveral Air Force Station at 8 p.m. Sunday. The first stage of the rocket returned to the Cape Canaveral, successfully touching down at Landing Zone 1. Photograph is an 8-minute time exposure of the launch and landing in one photo taken from the Ocean Club Marina at Port Canaveral.

SpaceX as soon as Wednesday afternoon aims to test-fire 27-engines powering its new Falcon Heavy rocket at Kennedy Space Center, a day after denying its Falcon 9 rocket was responsible for the reported failure of a classified government satellite mission. [Note: The Falcon Heavy test has been rescheduled for Thursday.]

In a statement Tuesday, SpaceX said the Falcon 9 “did everything correctly” during Sunday night’s launch of the mission called Zuma from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, and that it anticipated no delays to its launch schedule.

“If we or others find otherwise based on further review, we will report it immediately,” said Gwynne Shotwell, president and chief operating officer of Hawthorne, California-based SpaceX. “Information published that is contrary to this statement is categorically false. Due to the classified nature of the payload, no further comment is possible.”

If the rocket did experience a problem not revealed so far, it would risk grounding Elon Musk’s company for four to six months, as was the case when Falcon rockets suffered mishaps – one in flight and one on the launch pad – in 2015 and 2016.

That would be a major setback to start SpaceX’s most aggressive year yet, when it plans more than two-dozen launches, including the introduction of its heavy-lift rocket and the first test flights of an astronaut capsule for NASA.

“They’re going to have to average launching two missions a month or more,” said Marco Caceres, senior analyst and director of space studies at Teal Group in Fairfax, Virginia. “They can’t afford to slow down.”

Based on Shotwell’s statement, Caceres said he doubted SpaceX would slow down.

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SpaceX’s response implied that any fault with the mission Zuma lay instead with Northrop Grumman, which built the satellite and is believed to have provided the adapter attaching it to the rocket’s upper stage.

Northrop contracted with SpaceX for the launch on behalf of an unspecified U.S. agency.

“This is a classified mission,” said Lon Rains, a Northrop Grumman spokesman. “We cannot comment on classified missions.”

By Tuesday, speculation centered on Northrop’s adaptor, a unique piece of hardware that may never have flown before, as a potential failure cause.

One possibility was that the satellite did not separate from the upper stage as it should have. When SpaceX dropped the upper stage from a low orbit — a standard procedure to limit space junk — the satellite might have gone down with it.

There has been no official confirmation of a mission failure. But several news outlets, citing anonymous sources including congressional aides, reported that the Zuma satellite, which Caceres said was likely worth in the range of $500 million, had crashed into the ocean.

What is known is that the Falcon 9 blasted off from Launch Complex 40 at 8 p.m. Sunday on a northeasterly trajectory and appeared to be doing fine early in flight.

Eight minutes later, the rocket’s first stage flew back to Cape Canaveral for a landing. SpaceX confirmed during its launch broadcast that the nose cone protecting the satellite — the cause of a nearly two-month launch delay — had separated and fallen away as intended.

That left a problem with the rocket’s upper stage, the satellite or the adapter as potential culprits.

SpaceX’s statement defending the rocket appeared to rule out the upper stage.

“My guess is something went wrong with the adapter,” said space industry analyst Chris Quilty, president of Quilty Analytics in St. Petersburg.

In that best-case scenario for SpaceX, the company might still need time to prove its case to any investigating agency, providing data to exonerate its systems. That might mean short-term mission delays from which SpaceX could quickly recover.

Meanwhile, a network of amateur satellite trackers who specialize in tracking classified missions has yet to verify through its own observations that the Zuma mission was lost.

Marco Langbroek, a Netherlands-based professor who was closely watching the mission, said evidence showed the rocket’s upper stage did achieve orbit.

He noted that U.S. military’s Joint Space Operations Center, which tracks objects in space, did catalog an object designated “payload,” meaning that something completed at least one orbit.

If something went wrong — “a big ‘if’ – I am skeptical,” he wrote in a blog post — it could be that the spacecraft ended up in the wrong orbit, that it was “dead” after separating from the rocket or that it failed to separate properly. The latter option, he agreed, was the most plausible.

Amid the speculation over Zuma, SpaceX needed to say something to avoid giving rivals ammunition.

“The biggest risk is the folks at United Launch Alliance are going to use this as a club against SpaceX and argue for their Atlas V and Delta IV (rockets) as an alternative,” said Quilty.

But analysts note that even if the Falcon 9 suffered an obvious and spectacular failure, satellite operators have few better alternatives to switch to. Other rockets either cost much more, have reliability risks of their own, launch from more remote places or would take a year or two to become available.

That suggests SpaceX could recover, as it has before, from a third Falcon mishap if and when it happens.

“They’re going to move pretty quickly onto the next launch,” said Caceres. “I’d be very surprised if they slow down very much.”

Space Reporter Emre Kelly contributed to this story.

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