Official word from Gwynne Shotwell is that the Falcon functioned
perfectly. Northrop Grumman provided the payload adapter.
"For clarity: after review of all data to date, Falcon 9 did
everything correctly on Sunday night. If we or others find otherwise
based on further review, we will report it immediately."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/01/09/the-mystery-behind-the-fate-of-a-top-secret-satellite-comes-at-the-height-of-one-of-elon-musks-biggest-rivalries/?hpid=hp_hp-more-top-stories-2_secretsatellite-706am%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.1a2fa413e05d
More discussion and links on /r/spacex:
https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/7p7ev8/official_rspacex_zuma_postlaunch_discussion_thread/
Plenty of discussion on Twitter as well.
Evan Daniel
On Tue, Jan 9, 2018 at 11:37 AM, Nels Anderson <nels.anderson@xxxxxxx> wrote:
On 2018-01-09 01:24 AM, Rand Simberg wrote:
If so, no reason to think it was a launch failure. Crazy me, but if
there was a launch issue, I suspect they wouldn't be moving forward on
the flow for FH.
Might it have been a failure that's not relevant to the FH demo? Maybe
Zuma failed to separate from the second stage. Maybe SpaceX doesn't
much care whether Elon's roadster separates from FH's final stage (come
to think of it, is separation even planned?).