In a Monday press release, Virginia-based satellite communications company Intelstat announced that “the anomaly previously disclosed on October 19 has resulted in the total loss of the Intelsat 33e satellite. 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,” and so on and so forth.
It’s not clear why they used the world “anomaly” to describe what CBS reported was the fucking thing just exploding in orbit. Was Intelstat thinking “Ehhhh Boeing’s been catching enough shit lately, maybe we shouldn’t pile on them, especially since we can milk this for a discount”?
Then again, the CBS story mentions the Russians had recorded and analyzed the explosion, finding that the satellite – which had been in orbit without incident since 2016 – had met an “instantaneous and high-energy” fate, meaning nobody’s sure if it definitely exploded on its own and maybe they shouldn’t rule out that a small asteroid or piece of space junk to make it go kaboom in orbit.