Boeing’s bad year in space continues. Following the troubled first crewed flight of its Starliner spacecraft, now a satellite designed and built by the company appears to have exploded in orbit. The Intelsat 33e satellite was reported to have experienced an anomaly last week, and now it has been confirmed that the satellite has been totally lost.
The satellite was part of the Epic constellation from satellite services provider Intelsat, and its loss caused an interruption in communication services for customers in Europe, Africa, and parts of the Asia-Pacific region. The U.S. Space Force confirmed that the satellite had broken up and that it was tracking 20 pieces of debris, according to SpaceNews.
While it is typical for satellites to be deorbited at the end of their life, and sometimes satellites can even come close to colliding, it is unusual for a satellite to explode when going about normal operations. There is no information yet on what caused the satellite to break up, but it was presumably a serious failure of some of the hardware on board.
“Intelsat reported today that the anomaly previously disclosed on October 19 has resulted in the total loss of the Intelsat 33e satellite,” Intelsat wrote in a statement. “We are coordinating with the satellite manufacturer, Boeing, and government agencies to analyze data and observations. A Failure Review Board has been convened to complete a comprehensive analysis of the cause of the anomaly. Since the anomaly, Intelsat has been in active dialogue with affected customers and partners. Migration and service restoration plans are well underway across the Intelsat fleet and third-party satellites.”
The danger of such explosions isn’t just limited to the problems they cause for the companies and people who rely on them for communications and other services. The real threat is that unplanned breakups can throw off a large amount of space debris, with pieces traveling at high speeds. If this debris impacts other satellites or spacecraft, it can cause terrible damage. There is even a theory that unchecked proliferation of space junk could cut humans off from space by making orbits too dangerous to pass through.
In this case, the Space Force said that it observed “no immediate threats” but that it would continue to perform assessments of the debris.
A previous satellite from the same Intelsat series, Intelsat 29e, was also lost following an “anomaly” just three years after its launch. In that case, the issue was due to a propulsion system problem that caused a propellant leak. Intelsat 33e was launched six months after that satellite in August 2016.
