Now, see - here’s some ripe fodder for conspiracy theories. Look, a commercial partner launched these ‘nonfunctional spy satellites’ who will be definitely owned by ‘Not a government!’ in orbit! Look, you can point your radios at them, totally silent and non-communicative! You can stop looking at these guys, they were a bust. Guess we’ll need to launch TWO MORE to make up for it…
/s?
There are so many stories in the history of spaceflight of deployables not deploying, so it’s completely believable that they didn’t work. There are stories of astronauts kicking them, satellite operators jostling and gimbling and heating them, limited performance from partial failures…
Bigger cheaper rockets should hopefully mean less JWST Rube Goldberg style satellites because the extra volume and mass can be put to use. But it probably just means even bigger deployables…
This is the best summary I could come up with:
On the day before Christmas last year, a Falcon 9 rocket launched from California and put two spy satellites into low-Earth orbit for the armed forces of Germany, which are collectively called the Bundeswehr.
Engineers with OHB have tried to resolve the issue by resetting the flight software, performing maneuvers to vibrate or shake the antennas loose, and more to no avail.
According to the Der Spiegel report, the Bundeswehr says the two SARah satellites built by OHB remain the property of the German company and would only be turned over to the military once they were operational.
Shockingly, the German publication says that its sources indicated OBH did not fully test the functionality and deployment of the satellite antennas on the ground.
This setback comes as OHB is attempting to complete a deal to go private—the investment firm KKR is planning to acquire the German space company.
OHB officials said they initiated the effort to go private late last year because public markets had “structurally undervalued” the company.
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