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Comment by radu_floricica | Hacker News Reader

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".

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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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