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Comment by qup | Hacker News Reader

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.

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