SpaceX debris crashed onto Canadian farmland, highlighting a potential disaster | Hacker News Reader

SpaceX debris crashed onto Canadian farmland, highlighting a potential disaster

theconversation.com

23 pointsStratoscope25 comments

Some statements from NASA:

> After the more recent debris sightings, NASA and SpaceX now acknowledge that improvements are needed. The agency recently stated that initial studies expected the trunk to burn up fully upon reentry. “NASA and SpaceX will continue exploring additional solutions as we learn from the discovered debris,” NASA stated. “We did analysis back before Demo-2 and clearly the models don’t deal with the trunk very well,” Steve Stich, NASA commercial crew program manager, said in an interview after a Starliner briefing ahead of that mission’s June 6 launch. He said it’s likely because of the composite materials used in the trunk. “It’s almost like a thermal protection system.” The solution he said NASA and SpaceX are looking at involves changing deorbiting procedures. Currently, the trunk is released before the capsule performs its orbit burn. That means the trunk can remain in orbit for months before making an uncontrolled reentry. Instead, Stich said engineers are examining doing the deorbit burn and then releasing the trunk. That would provide more control of where the trunk reenters, ensuring that any debris that survives reentry lands in unpopulated regions. “We’re in the process of doing that work right now,” he said. “I would love to have something in place next year if we can, but we’ve got to do all the right analysis. We’ve got make sure that it’s safe for the crew.”

https://spacenews.com/nasa-and-spacex-studying-ways-to-mitig...

Since this topic often leads up to discussion about Starlink debris, and since one of the authors on this piece has a well known bias against SpaceX in particular, it should be emphasized that this a Dragon specific issue, several dozen Starlink satellites have deorbited over the past years with zero associated debris having survived intact to the surface.

And since it's probably also going to come up, the other recent case of debris hitting a house in IIRC Florida, those were batteries from the ISS that were intended to be brought down in a controlled manner via a cargo vehicle, but due to delays and it becoming unsafe to keep the batteries at the station, NASA had to take the risk of uncontrolled disposal despite expecting that some debris might not be fully vaporized on the way down.

While there is an issue of setting standards for reentering debris, while Samantha would love for you to believe SpaceX in particular, and NASA are behaving negligently, they've been leading the pack on figuring out the appropriate standards, with the Dragon trunk survivals being an abnormality that didn't fit with their models. Same goes with things like reducing the brightness of their satellites.

Fun fact 1:

Elon has repeatedly said that Earth is vastly under populated, and that, if you drop an anvil from a plane there ja pretty much zero chance of it hitting a human. Seems like what used to be a thought experiment of his has now been executed.

Fun fact 2:

Saskatchewan, where the debris came down, is where Elon actually spent quite a bit of time doing farm work before he came to the United States.

What is the definition of "disaster"?

I would say a potential tragedy. Disaster is not going to happen.

Disaster was when a Chinese spacecraft desintegrated. This being an US one, is a tragedy. /s

Yes, there is a risk, just like every other activity in the human society. Since currently the risk is so small as to be unmeasurable, I refuse to worry about it and don't really understand why we need a conversation about this - other than purely political "company X does a bad thing".

Sometimes the point is to have a conversation before there’s a meaningful problem. A ~1-10% risk to someone per year when a company wants to ramp things exponentially higher isn’t a trivial risk anymore.

Further, there’s different standards when companies are risking random members of the public especially people in other countries not just employees or customers.

The article highlights that there is a yearly chance of human injury measured in a whole number percentage, that is currently rising. It even highlighted an incident in Fl where a piece of space junk hit the roof of a house and penetrated to the foundation.

The risk is real, measurable, measured, and rising.

I don't understand this logic. You're framing this like humanity as a whole is supposed to take the risk here. This is a private company throwing junk from space on people who didn't agree to anything.

This is a mission requested by and developed in partnership with NASA, with the service provided by SpaceX.

Now the people in Australia or Canada don't have a direct stake in NASA, but it's not just SpaceX doing this on their own.

NASA and SpaceX are working together to mitigate this particular source of debris.

https://spacenews.com/nasa-and-spacex-studying-ways-to-mitig...

Did you see the size of the pieces they found? Do you believe junk the size of a car door falling at terminal velocity on a populated area is a risk "so small as to be unmeasurable"?

The popular theory on why they've survived the trip down even though that doesn't fit the modeling from NASA and SpaceX is that their terminal velocity is very low.

For practical purposes does this matter? There is a lot of range between lethal and burns up on re-entry speeds for a ping pong table sized piece of debris.

Then they should improve the modeling, as a start

Amazing insight!

The risk of that debris falling from outer space and hitting a human is indeed incredibly small.

I'm not sure how you can say otherwise. Nobody's ever been hit by one, right?

It can still damage property. I'd love to see how you can handle suing a corporation from another country when you could barely pay your mortgage and now your house is gone, and you forgot to get space debris insurance.

Just because nobody dies, doesn't mean these things can't have dramatic consequences.

The point of the article is that the frequency of launches is increasing, and the frequency at which pieces are surviving re-entry is increasing. I don’t think past performance is necessarily indicative of the future here.

It's not increasing, though. The number of launches to the space station has been relatively constant for the last 30 years or so. And it's only those launches that have this problem. The other ~100 launches or so SpaceX does each year don't.

It's not only about hitting a human. Of course you can say the risk is small if you pick the smallest target? Houses, roads, barns, gas stations, and infrastructure makes up a small but relevant part of the land area here. We already have examples of space junk hitting houses, and examples of large junk than expected touching down. If we continue business as is and keep scaling up rocket launches, the risk just keeps increasing until property starts getting damaged. Is it a huge risk? No it's a manageable one. But definitely not a negligible one.

> on a populated area

Nice random qualifier there. The debris is falling over the entire earth, this one had bad luck enough to be noticed.

So yes, the risk is pretty much negligible

The article also mentions pieces of the same Crew Dragon mission landing on the roof of a house in North Carolina. Pieces of a non Crew Dragon mission going through a roof, and floor of a house in Florida.

So no, the risk isn’t negligible.

The Florida incident wasn't from Crew Dragon, it was "trash" released directly from the ISS:

https://www.nbcnews.com/science/space/nasa-space-station-deb...

Oh you’re right. I updated my comment to reflect that so as to not spread misinformation. That said the point stands. ISS junk hitting you will cause just as much damage as SpaceX junk.

Why do you think that qualifier is random? There's very little risk when things hit the ocean, it's a non populated area. That's why we do launches over it. In a populated area, there are things like houses and roads which can be hit, and cause a lot of problems. I really don't see how people can think it's "negligible" when we already have space junk hitting houses, and the pieces are getting larger. That sounds like... Negligence to me.

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