Tech Fault - DoD’s oldest weather satellite explodes, debris field still expanding

Even though sound is impossible in a vacuum, it’s basically impossible to keep an explosion quiet in space. This week, news broke that in early February a satellite in the US Department of Defense’s longest running weather satellite had exploded in orbit. The government is blaming a “temperature spike,” which is about as helpful as saying a person died because of “lethal trauma.” The military is being characteristically tight-lipped about the disaster, but despite the wish to keep a low profile, public safety meant it had to acknowledge the explosion publicly. The explosion itself had a limited impact, but now there’s a potentially bigger problem: dozens of pieces of satellite shrapnel now headed outward in all directions.

Those 43 pieces of debris are all currently being tracked as they move through space, and warnings for course corrections will be given out to space operators as needed. Though at this point it seems unlikely that the satellite explosion will lead to any runaway cascades of orbital destruction, it’s worth pointing out the danger: this seemingly spontaneous explosion could have caused real damage to every party in space. So, the question for anyone concerned with preventing more such dangerous rolls of the cosmic dice from occurring again in the future is this: what exactly caused this explosion?

The most immediately obvious possibility is a solar event like a sun-spot. These can certainly wreak havoc with space technology, but they tend to interfere with electronics more than super-heat parts of the body. In fact, it’s hard to imagine any solar event that could have caused such catastrophic damage without

The threat of a runaway cascade of orbital debris is real,

also damaging, or at least

and growing.

affecting, other similar satellites. We can also rule out aggressive action from any other space power — if anyone was going to try something with American space tech, they wouldn’t tip their hand with a cloud-monitoring weather satellite. (All cynicism about official stories aside, Defense Meteorological Satellite Program Flight 13 almost certainly was really looking at clouds.)

One remaining option is that the satellite, being so old, simply suffered a mechanical or design failure that led it to fold under regular solar pressures. This is certainly possible, though if so it seems to demand an inquiry into that defect, and into how such a defect could be prevented from recurring in the future. As of right now, there has not been any suggestion that the explosion will be used to prevent future accidents of a similar nature. This might be nothing more than typically closed lips on these issues, but it could also imply something more secretive.