JF Mezei wrote:

On 2018-01-13 09:16, Jeff Findley wrote:

Hard to say exactly, but from the people that have talked a bit about it
(Congressional staffers leaking that the mission failed to the press),
I'd say it failed. It's quite unlikely that whoever owns this thing in
the US Government would lie to Congress and it's unlikely that
Congressional staffers would leak a lie.


Is it likely the rocket lauched something else on top of Zuma, and that
something else was succesfully deployed and Zuma failed? (either on
purpose or by accident) ?


Unlikely in the extreme.


Assuming this had been a commercial launch of only 1 satellite, would
SpaceX still get paid for bringing the payload where its contract stated
it would bring it (and blame the payload folks for failiure to detach
from stage 2) ?


That depends. If the commercial satellite designed to the SpaceX
interface documents so that a standard payload adapter could be used,
then SpaceX is responsible. If, on the other hand, things were like
they were with Zuma, where L-M designed and built a specialized
payload adapter and that's where the failure was, then SpaceX did what
they were contracted to do and they get paid.


Also, in a military launch, would regular SpaceX staff man the control
room for both stage I and 2, or would stage 2 and satellite deployment
switch to some miliatry staff control room so SpaceX not involved in
actual secret deployments ?


SpaceX would control the mission.


While I am at it: would super secret milirary launch still have various
cameras on board to monitor success/failures (buit not brodcasted
publicly, of course) or would the confidential nature of it preclude
any video feeds from the rocket ?


Maybe yes, maybe no.


--
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Life has a special meaning that the protected
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