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Comment by ralfd | Hacker News Reader

Understandable, but an over reaction. Any debris not burning up is falling down after minutes.

Would you bet hundreds of lives and millions of dollars on that?

Yes. Space debris near orbiting speeds doesn't fall straight down, it's simple physics.

If anything planes much further downrange (thousands of km) should be diverted, not immediately under the re-entry point.

It wasn’t at orbital speeds yet.

Over 21000km/h when it broke up, compared to ~28k for stuff orbiting in LEO. Should still go quite far.

Yes, although drag is gonna be… substantially higher like this as well.

Does melting down not reshape metallic particles into ideal droplett parts ?

No.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/02/world/africa/kenya-space-...

The planes diverting were downrange. Also, I doubt they had much information to go off, and were essentially flying blind about where the debris were unless they had a direct line to NORAD.

Do you have a better explanation why they are doing donuts over the pacific at the time of reentry, then were diverted?

https://www.flightaware.com/live/flight/ABX3133

https://www.flightaware.com/live/flight/N121BZ/history/20250...

https://www.flightaware.com/live/flight/NKS172

> donuts over the pacific

Atlantic

Doh!

Nuts!

I don't have. Maybe they were indeed diverted because people got scared? Still seems pointless given the distances involved. Most reports are coming from social media / people watching flightradar24, and news media is just picking those up.

There are several, all at the same time, all in the same area, where the debreis was seen.

Why do you think it is pointless?

If I am a pilot and the tower says "debris seen heading east of Bahamas", I probably wont want to keep flying towards that direction.

Yeah, it is probably low risk, but I dont have a super computer or detailed map of the Starship debris field or entry zone.

I was on r/flightradar24 and someone was listening on ATC and heard that one of the flights declared emergency due to fuel.

Other planes were also caught up in the chaos but SJU was at capacity apparently

The ATC is up on YouTube - I heard it on the vatsim channel. ATC would not let pilots transit the designated danger airspace without declaring an emergency. So they did.

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