This is the ingot’s moment of sacrifice. The upper stage performs a “ballast jettison” burn. Explosive bolts fire. Pneumatic pushers shove the ingot away from the stack at 1.5 meters per second.

The ingot does not deploy. It does not phone home. It becomes debris—a silent, 500-kilo brick now in a slightly lower parking orbit than the satellites it just supported. This is where the story gets controversial.

But for the engineers in the cleanroom, the mission’s most stressful moment isn't the liftoff. It happens 24 hours earlier, inside a climate-controlled high bay, when a stack of painted steel or aluminum—utterly inert and devoid of electronics—is bolted to the top of a million-dollar rocket.