The Intelsat Rocket Disaster of 1996 | Episode 43

In this very special return episode, we're going to discuss the concept of what goes up must come down. Of course, you know when they say that, they never really get specific about where or in how many pieces. Hello and welcome to Doomsday Histories Most Dangerous Podcast. Together we are going to rediscover some of the most traumatic, bizarre, and aspiring, but largely unheard of or forgotten disasters from throughout human history and around the world. On today's episode, we'll discuss the most bloodthirsty game of roulette ever. You'll see what happens when seventy five hundred Dodge caravans worth a fuel explodes within walking distance, and you'll learn why you should never put your kids in a sewer, no matter how great of a parent you are. This is not the show you play around kids, or while eating or even a mixed company. But as long as you find yourself a little more historically engaged and learn something that could potentially save your life, our work is done. So with all that said, shoot the kids out of the room, put on your headphones and safety glasses, and let's begin. We're going to begin today's episode in Russha. I was going to say, we're going to Russia with love. But nobody really shows how much love for Russia these days, not like back in their heyday. For example, take their history of space exploration and human satellite technology. And already you're thinking, ah, boy, I waited, however long for this guy to pull himself together enough to feed me, and he's feeding me this. Well. First, thank you, it is nice to be back. And second, just you wait, you know how we do on this show. It was sixty five years ago and the date was October fourth, nineteen fifty seven. The Soviet Union launched the first ever man made object into space without it exploding or crashing or flying off into the Sun, just calmly delivered into a stationary Earth orbit. If the space race had a birthday, that was it. Sputnik was a shiny aluminum ball, not much bigger than a beach ball. It orbited the Earth every ninety six minutes, tripping away in the headsets of ham radio operators around the world, and it was a big fun so they knew it was going to work. But on that you think you hate your job, let me tell you about working in Russia in the nineteen hundreds. You ever hear of Sergei Korlev probably not. Coralev was an aerospace engineer. It'd spent his entire career and designing long range missiles for the military. That was until it was decided that maybe he was working a little too slow, and the secret police decided to slap his ass on a train to Siberia about it. They thought spending his days breaking rocks and a forced labor gulag meet the worst one available, according to Yulag Gelp, they thought this might help focus his attention better. Either way, he continued working on rocket designs and prison out of prison until he was dead. And without this poor mistreated man, there would be no Spunnik and we would not be telling this story today. The Americans did try to play ketchup with their own Vanguard satellite designs, but they kind of exploded on the launch pad, so no. But meanwhile, all the way over in China, the Chinese government quietly watched and learned Sputnik had been the spark that quietly ignited their own secretive space program. In nineteen sixty four, China successfully launched and retrieved an experimount rocket and its crew of Chinese space mice. By nineteen seventy they had launched the dongfang Hong one and with that became the fifth country with their own satellite in space, only behind Russia, the US, France, and Japan. They would go on to have their own space station and land a vehicle on the far side of the Moon. But we're going to start our story by pulling back just a little bit back in nineteen eighty six, the Space Shuttle Challenger lifted off with seven astronauts on board, including civilian teacher CHRISTA McAuliffe. It had reached forty six thousand feet in only seventy three seconds, and it was seven miles or eleven kilometers down range when it exploded. I remember watching it unfold live with half a sandwich hanging out of my young face. The consoling thought at the time was, of course, that everyone on board would have go died instantly. But yeah, it turns out the nose and crew compartment had blown off and some of the astronauts were very much alive as they fell for the next two minutes and forty five seconds. In the aftermath, all Shuttle flights were grounded for the better part of three years. Civilians were banned from future Shuttle flights, and commercial payloads were no longer welcome on Shuttle missions. That meant no more satellite launches. This meant that satellite providers had to fly commercial, so to speak. So you need to launch a multimillion dollar piece of hardware into orbit and you are ship you start price shopping. Have you considered how beautiful places like Kazakhstan and French Guyana are this time of year? International launch centers became very popular and very competitive, and we're going to focus on China's. And to be clear, it's not like China was just some discount service provider lobbing cargo in space. They had launched more space vehicles than any other country. They had one of the most powerful space programs on or off the planet. The global market for launch services had grown to five billion dollars. So yeah, they wanted a piece, and they were able to offer prices foreign companies couldn't refuse. I mean, fifty six million dollars to light a candle sounds pretty expensive, sure, but that was only half the going rate for European launch centers. China had been using their long march rockets for years, and by nineteen ninety six they had upgraded to the Long March three B. It was a three stage rocket with four strap on boosters arrayed around the base. It should have been called the four B, but three is considered a lucky number in Asian cultures, where four is associated with death. These were the largest rockets China had ever built. Picture a rocket as tall as an eighteen story building and the boosters stood as tall as five story buildings. It weighed about four hundred and seventy tons, and yeah, you'd guess everything about it, and then fairly phallic. It just had this big bulbous head on the thing for payload. And the payload for this mission was an American built seventh generation communication satellite called the Intel SAT seven eight. It was a geostationary satellite providing TV, wireless, phone, and internet across China, Russia, and the Middle East. It was built by a company called Laurel. Laurel provides every kind of satellite service you can think of, except for delivery, of course. And we're jumping around a bit here. But because this was a US built piece of tech going into the hands of a foreign competitor, it fell under itar jurisdiction that stands for international traffic in arms regulations. It's all part of the US Department of State, and their whole job is to keep any kind of events technologies from falling into the wrong hands, like anyone's hands, and they cover everything from actual nukes to diesel turbin engines. Highlights include everything from subs and directed energy weapons to micro organisms and chemical weapons, and yes, launch vehicles, guidance systems, and satellites also are on their to do list. If you've ever had to perform some tedious bureaucratic function that required two forms of ID, you can only imagine what it tar could do to you when trying to launch an American satellite on a Chinese rocket on Chinese soil. Which brings us today to the Zixiang Satellite Launch Center in Southern Sichuan Province in China. South Cishang was a full service launch center. It contained an entire miniature city to house employees. It even had hotel for visiting workers and foreign dignitaries. CCTV cameras carried a feed from Pad two of the Xishang Satellite Launch Center to launch parties across the country and overseas. About fifteen LRAAL employees were taking part in today's launch, while more than two hundred others watched from Intel San Francisco headquarters. And the thing is, this wasn't just the launch of a satellite. This was also the very first made in flight of the brand new Long March three B and a happy Shinnian how to everyone. The date was February fifteenth, nineteen ninety six, just four days before the Chinese New Year. They usually like to celebrate with elaborate firework displays, and we'll celebrate too, just a little early. The center had been set in a remote, semi mountainous area, surrounded by villages of anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand people. These were not exactly metropolises in a country that had more than ninety cities of over a million people. The closest was a small village called Meeln. It sat just south of the rocket's flight path, and it was separated from the launchpad by a row of steep mountains. The engineers had boarded vans in Beijing and had passed through hundreds of launch fans and admiring dowkers assembled outside the main gate. The way this was supposed to happen. Was a few days before a launch, local residents are ordered to evacuate the area for their own safety. Mind you, many choose to do so by making popcorn and evacuating to the main gate to watch the launches. The main gate sat about three miles or five kilometers from the actual launch pad, but it was a great view. They weren't blessed with an abundance of roller rings and laser tag centers in this part of the country, but a rocket launch is its own kind of entertainment. It really brought out a kind of a party atmosphere. The launch had been scheduled for two fifty one that morning, but the Chinese quietly just added nine minutes to the clock with no explanation offered. A guessing man might assume that rounding up to three made it a much luckier number than two fifty one, but this wasn't the kind of decision that you usually make all willy nilly stateside, But again we're not stateside. Case in point. As the final countdown approached, they plunked another forty five seconds on the clock, and again no explanation given. And all this created a little confusion as the countdown near t minus zero, all the clocks were out of sync still with a mighty bush of the main engines and boosters. The platform glowed and shook as the mighty missile lifted from the pad and began its heavenly ascent, followed by a massive burst of applause. For about five seconds after a rocket launches, it begins to pitch over to pick up an incredible amount of horizontal velocity to help it escape gravity's grip. But you know that thing where you're helping guide someone with your hands kind of mentally, just kind of shifting them away from a thing they're about to hit. Well, it's never a good thing when you see an entire room full of engineers worriedly doing that do a TV screen. The rocket began to lose balance before it even cleared the umbilical platform. Adjuster nozzles fired wildly trying to correct its trajectory as the rocket continued veering to the left, and only seconds after leaving the gantry, it tilted fully and the thing was much like a roulette ball. It could have fallen in any one of three hundred and sixty different unrelated degrees of direction, but Instead, it focused on the direction of the hotel and the residential complex, not that the people there needed to be told. See, an orbital rocket can reach up to two hundred decibels of sound, and that kind of acoustic energy is strong enough to damage buildings, can kill any human too close to its source. So imagine that racing towards you. Only a few hundred feet off the ground. It flew sideways down the valley, fully horizontal and accelerating wildly. Compare the thrust needed to send an ordinary object straight up into orbit compared to horizontal flight. The first stage of the rocket created about six hundred and sixty five thousand pounds of thrust. The boosters added another one hundred and sixty five thousand. It only took seventeen seconds to clear the distance from point A to ground zero. The satellite alone weighed over ten thousand pounds, and as the rocket flew, gravity pulled on the payload, dragging the rocket further and further down as it arked over and the rocket flew until it wasn't a rocket anymore, and neither was the area that it fell on. Not a rocket, I mean, I'm just not a habitable area. The impact site was the side of a mountain, right next to the gate of the center, where the large crowd had gathered to watch. The whole payload section had broken off moments before impact, and typically a rocket burns through stages like drop away fuel tanks, but this rocket had only blown through the smallest fraction of its available fuel. Each of the boosters carried eighty three thousand pounds of the stuff. The first stage of the rocket carried a wopping four hundred and ten thousand pounds, the second stage carried one hundred and nine thousand, and the third carried another forty and that's enough to fill almost seventy five hundred Dodge caravans. Almost immediately after came a thunderous explosion, and the world shook violently. The next ten seconds, the night became day, technically brighter than day. The impact was said to be comparable to twenty tons or forty thousand pounds of TNT. One ton or two thousand pounds of TNT puts out just over four gigajewels of energy, which is the equivalent to zero point zero two nuclear explosion, Which sounds small, but is there really any such thing as a small nuclear explosion. The US Navy detonated forty thousand pounds off the coast of Florida last year, and it created a three point nine magnitude earthquake. One witness said, I heard the biggest explosion of my life. I turned and I started to run. I saw a friend's face contorted in kind of a oh shit look. I heard a smaller and then a larger boom. I left the ground, and then I was on the ground, scrambling, wondering why was I down here. I heard glass breaking and was flying everywhere. The control room was plunged into darkness until the emergency lighting kicked in, and a senior engineer had been on his way up to the roof to watch when the shockwave threw him through a window to his death. Another engineer died after catching a shard of glass through the neck. A CCTV cameraman had been blown off the roof, but his camera never stopped, and the video he captured showed a massive mushroom cloud rising from the hill. The explosion flattened buildings. Brick walls lay dismantled everywhere, and walls that remained upright were pock marked with debris. There was no report on how many people ate glass that night. The windows were no longer a thing anywhere. Everything looked like a postcard from World War II. American witnesses couldn't believe what they'd just seen. The mountain where it struck looked like it had been kicked by God. They were all, what the holy fucking shit happened? And that is an actual quote. And the next day, as they toured the site, they had trouble identifying well anything really. Most of the buildings had been brick and concrete block with wood roofs, at least they used to have wood roofs. They were almost universally blown away by the explosion. The clock in one surviving building had stopped at three oh one am. Homes, cars, trees, everything had been crushed and burned and thrown. One building had a doorframe standing with the door blown out and the surrounding walls, so really it was just a doorframe. Villagers were seen pouring over the apocalyptic scene, and shock pieces of the rocket lay everywhere, some so big you could mistake them for parts of an airplane. Even the nose cone was found largely intact. It was just laying beside a broken wall. The hills were scoured for pieces of the satellite. Those workers wore gloves, but they mostly didn't have masks, which is not great. Rule a thumb, if you ever find yourself near any kind of space debris, leave it be. The fuel residue alone is extremely toxic. After the explosion, while the engineers were all still in hiding, the Chinese overseers shut off the air conditioning to the buildings, set up toxicity detectors, and handed out gas masks. Now, thankfully, the wind blew all those gases away from the buildings. A given how prepared they were, it spoke volumes about how poisonous and awful the fuel was. Groups of soldiers in their dark green uniforms and circular military caps carried away debris, then pretty much immediately complained about severe headaches and their eyes bulging out of their heads. Exposure to rocket fuel, especially glycolic rocket fuel, can damage the brain, lungs, liver, kidneys, and that leads to propound shock and organ failure and death, not to mention total recalling your eyeballs out while gagging uncontrollably. Mechanical components were retrieved and brought to a military warehouse for investigators to pour over, and the next day the Western engineers were told that a bus was coming to take them back to Beijing. But the whole thing was clearly giving off a pretty bad vie, so a few of the American engineers stole bicycles and snuck out of the compound. They did it because they knew the guard at the gate, and they knew that he had only been given one bullet. They found the surrounding areas had been swarmed by soldiers and ambulances and military vehicles, and dozens of flatbed trucks left the scene with mysteriously tarped cargo on it, which I can only say was fairly rank and vaguely biological in shape. To keep the locals from collecting souvenirs, Chinese soldiers were lined up on the perimeter of the impact site and along the main railway line leading to the complex. So you're sequestered in a hotel room by a foreign government and become the target of a sudden rocket attack, would you know what to do? This was the question faced by the people of Hawaii after receiving an emergency warning telling them to seek shelter immediately. Coma. This is not a drill man. He tweeted that they were hiding in bathtubs or under mattresses, and layering up under as many layers of protection is a good step. So gold star for all those people. Others lowered their children into sewers to save them from the impending blasts, and I'm sure the experience didn't have all kinds of long term psychological effects. Also on that, I commend the parents for selflessly doing anything they could think of to save the children. But people do drown in sewers, sometimes in the feces, sometimes just in the gas. See our last episode for details. But first things first, an alarm will be signaled, and it's going to be something you probably haven't heard before. They were doing nuclear warning testing in my area a while back, and the woo sound was just left everyone shaking their heads. So it's important to know one an alarm sounds like, so it's not confused for an amber alert or some kind of marketing and flash sail. Second thing, and I know you've got to be sick of me saying this by now, but try to remain calm. Always remember you don't panic your way out of a situation you think your way out. In fact, in Israel, rocket attacks are so normalized that the citizens turn to dark humor to cope with the tension. And I don't think that should come to any real surprise to any of the EMTs and other rescue workers who listen to this show case. In point, they have an emergency alert app for incoming missiles and it's just called YO like YO, missile incoming now. If your missile isn't flying directly at you at one hundred feet off the ground, you might not know exactly where it's expected to land. The goal is to put as much space between you and ground zero. But don't go stalling out your vehicle in wall to wall traffic. You're way better off in the closest, strongest looking building, preferably with a concrete basement. I mean, even underground parking can do the job. Sadly, though, if you're in a tall building, you are going to need to take the stairs. His elevators, as we've said, are death traps during explosions. According to the US Department of Homeland Security, they advise that if you're worried about this kind of thing, you should really just call your local city Hall and find out where the closest fallout show alters in your area might be. Like we said, thinking straight in a panic situation to be difficult, so it's actually handy to make a list of nearby buildings that offer shelter ahead of time, basements, subway tunnels, just get creative. Ideally, you want to be where no glass or windows are present, so you don't have to worry about playing catch. If you're outside and you have no hope of making it to shelter, you're just gonna want to hunker down, just face down into the lowest lying area you can see, preferably a ditch. You're gonna want to get down until the danger passes, But until then you could be facing anything from a building fire to a piece of wall sticking out of your dietphragm. And I'm not going to be able to teach you how to do everything in one safety segment, So the safest thing that I can tell you to do is to re listen to every episode we've ever done and then tell a friend and then quiz each other back at the launch center. It took most of the day for that bus to finally arrive, which they suspected was for their benefit. The Chinese had organized a clean up so foreigners wouldn't have to see anybodies, and just as importantly, bodies wouldn't be seen by foreigners. You know, you got to keep your best face forward all the time. An initial Chinese investigation concluded that the rockets guidance systems had malfunctioned. Have you ever had vertigo? I have, and it sucks. There's something that goes wrong inside your ear, and your balance and equilibrium go out the window, and the whole world goes topsy turvy and you lay on the floor just trying to pick a direction, and all this because of bad information being sent from your ears to your brain. And it's the exact same thing here. Now. The insurance companies were all, that's nice, but this isn't a Ford focus. This is a seventy million dollars space vehicle. So if you don't mind, we will do our own investigation. Thank you very much. Doctor wallyim Laurel's senior VP and GM for Engineering and Manufacturing shared and into Tendant Review Committee. It included members from QES Aerospace, Daimler, Benz, Intelsat, British Aerospace and general dynamics. They met repeatedly in Beijing and Polo Alto to review inertial components, backs and other failure analysis reports, and by the time they were done, they had figured there were four things that could have gone wrong, and after careful testing and analysis, they ruled out all but one. A circuit had failed in the rocket's IMU, or inertial measurement unit. He uses gyroscopes in different meters to understand the rocket's orientation, speed, force, angular rate, and it fed all that bad information about its position and flight path to the rocket, which took it and did try to correct the trajectory and in the end basically ended up turning Texas left, which I believe means down. There was a much more involved explanation involving poor gold aluminum bonding points and output modules and server loops, But this is all the time and detail that I'm going in it for your sakes. Compared to America or Europe, China's safety regulations are a little more less than because of that, from time to time, one of their rockets or boosters or whatever makes its way back to Earth right into the heart of a populated area. But since you can't palm rocket parts off on eBay. All people got were selfies and roofing bills. Chinese social media has all the receipts, and this wasn't the only exciting incident the members of the US team witnessed while they were there. They saw several close calls and accidents. While the Intel Sat seven oh eight was being prepared at a satellite processing station several miles from the pad, one of the solid fuel rocket motors accidentally ignited and wildly redecorated the building. And more than that, this was the third long March failure in as many years, the third failure in five tries. So let's get into why this situation was so so bad. Rocket parts one oh one multi sage rockets break down into sections stages that are basically giant fuel tanks that feed booster engines, and once they're dry, they get jettisoned off to cut down on the total weight and freeing up the next stage to do its thing. Because of this, most launch sites around the world are built along coastlines, althose rocket parts and stage debris land somewhere up to sea and it just becomes some lobster's problem. But China went in a different direction. It built all its centers in a weird time of off brand piece, and because of this, they located them thousands of miles inland to protect them from foreign attack. Were possible, the Chinese made efforts to ensure that toxic or radioactive or actively flaming debris fell into wooded and unpopulated areas, except that flaming debris plus wood does not a good combo make. The two hundred and ten million dollar cost of the satellite and launch expenses had been insured, but the Space Insurance Agency wasn't happy about it, so they strong armed Laurel into helping China These engineers correct the problems and help ensure that future launches could be insured, which they did, and it directly led to the improved reliability of the Long March rockets, but it also led to controversy it tar was in a huff. All this spirit of sharing and cooperation meant that China was getting free American nerd work that was also benefiting their missile industry. Add to that, the Intel seven O eight contained sophisticated communications and encryption technology not intended for sharing, which made Luo's actions a lot more like breaking military and defense regulations than just tripping up on some non disclosure agreement. US investigators published their own report on the disaster, which in short, accused Laurel of allowing the Chinese to acquire sensitive Intel SAT technology and accused China of being dix. In the end, Laurel was charged with committing a quote a defense service in violation of export control regulations. I mean, nobody went to jail or nothing, but a raw did have to pay twenty million dollars in fines for their treachery, and after that no export licenses to China have been issued, not since nineteen ninety six. An official at the Bureau of Industry and Security emphasized that no US origin content, regardless of significance, regardless of whether it's incorporated into a form made item, can go to China. The US Department of Defense recovered the satellites encryption and decryption equipment, which is really what they had wanted to keep private. A year later, when engineers first returned to Zishan, the launch center buildings had all been rebuilt or replaced. It was like nothing had ever happened, but the village surrounding the complex was gone. It had been scraped away and removed entirely as if it had never been there, Erased from the map along with Alt's residents. No memorial, no media mentions except for one the Chinese state media newsagent and see Jinois. They're state controlled media out Latin and they have a fairly long history of questionable reporting. Well. They reported that only six people had died and another fifty seven had been injured. The total population in the village was under a thousand, and they claimed that most, if not all, of the population had been evacuated before the launch. And if you're feeling skeptical about all that, please go right ahead. I don't even know how you fit a pair of testicles that large into newscasters suit pants, let alone through a standard TV studio doorframe. The Americans had estimated the death toll range between two and five hundred people. One belief was that the official death toll really only counted in military personnel who were caught by the explosion and did not include civilians either way. This disaster even outranks are nineteen sixteen Adellan Rocket disaster episode and much the same as after the loss of the Challenger. The disaster at Sichang did create a legacy of safety. The long March rocket family improved in reliability and did not experience another mission failure until twenty eleven. The Intelsat had been designed to last the next fifteen years, but it barely lasted more than fifteen seconds. And even though we can't officiate anything with all the obfuscation and state secrecy, it is widely accepted that this was the deadliest accident in space history. In twenty thirteen, the Russians launched a Proton M rocket that also had a catastrophic guidance failure. They installed the IMU upside down and after takeoff it did its best to turn around. Of course, the Russians launched in the middle of nowhere, so the only thing hurt were the engineer's job prospects. The Russians keep this kind of thing pretty close to the vest same with the Chinese. That village is a memory now and that makes further investigation kind of difficult. But very near the spot where the rocket it made impact stood a statue at a fork in the road of an archer pointing high to the sky. Obviously, this is about the challenge of human perseverance and all that, but as I study it, I thought the thing about firing anything skyboard is they always have to come back down. You can reach us on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook as you can reach us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook at Doomsday Podcast or fire us an email to Doomsdaypod at gmail dot com. Older episodes can be found wherever you've found this one, and while you're there, please leave us a review. Let me tell your friends. If you want to support the ongoing production of the show, you can find us at Patreon dot com, slash funeral Kazoo or just buy me a coffee dot com slash Doomsday. But if you can spare the money and had to choose, we ask you to consider making donation to Global Medic. Global Metic is a rapid response agency of Canadian volunteers offering assistance around the world to aid in the aftermath of disaster and crises. They're often the first and sometimes the only team to get critical interventions to people in life threatening situations, and to date they have helped over three point six million people across seventy seven different countries. You can learn more and donate at Globalmatic dot CA. On the next episode, grab your driving gloves, your swimsuit, and update your will. We are finally heading to Florida. It's the Sunshine Skyway Bridge disaster of nineteen eighty. We'll talk soon. Safety goggles off and thanks for listen for you, DoD Burgard