New Long March 5B Uncontrolled Reentry Tracked by Aerospace's Experts

Nobody agrees a priori to China’s assessment of their economic value.

The area of the earth’s surface occupied by humans (not their stuff, but the people themselves) is around 8000 km^2 (1m^2 per person) out of a total Earth surface area of 510 million km^2. so the probability is around 1.6E-5 or 0.0016% per launch. This obviously doesn’t account for the specific trajectory or population distribution, but gives us a rough order of magnitude.

I would prefer they didn’t do it also, and it definitely loses them international good will - but it’s a pretty low (but non-zero) risk.

[typo corrected]

That sounds pretty serious. Was there any official investigation or just ambiguous pictures posted on social media?

This is not "your grandfather jaywalked" case but pretty rational I think. But you know where it will end up when for example our "leader" the US had declared that it does not recognize ICC, and will take any measures starting with sanctions and including force if it ever gets prosecuted. The other countries take it as an example. Cant blame them for not buying into that do as I say bullshit.

If it fell on your house with you sleeping inside I'm sure the liabilities treaties would make your family be totally ok with it.

How valuable is that? We can determine that using the concept of the "statistical value of a human life". For example, the NRC assigns a human life a statistical value of $9M when determining of the cost of some nuclear safety improvement is justified. This is similar to the value used for determining if traffic safety improvements are worthwhile or if medical procedures are justified.

Multiplying, this is saying that it's unacceptable that the cost of a reentry be as a little as $900. This seems quite unreasonable: the cost of avoiding uncontrolled entry should often be much higher than this. And indeed, if you look at what NASA actually does, it often gives wavers of this requirement. This tells me the requirement is of dubious legitimacy, existing more for PR purposes than because it's good policy.

I doubt the Chinese care about the political optics enough to waste their time avoiding such a low expected cost outcome. Nor should airlines cancel flights to avoid something like that either -- the cost far exceeds the expected benefit.