A sale of a decommissioned observation payload has collapsed after buyers concluded that the inherited custody liabilities tied to the platform’s historical output were too burdensome to price safely.
The hardware itself was still attractive. The problem was the tail. Once auditors reviewed what obligations might survive around archived data, unresolved access rights, and derivative claims, the deal stopped looking like a bargain and started looking like a litigation surface.
This is one of the clearest signs that old payloads are no longer just hardware assets. They are institutions with baggage.