Starlink satellite part hit a Canadian farm when it fell from orbit | Hacker News Reader

Starlink satellite part hit a Canadian farm when it fell from orbit

newscientist.com

18 pointsironyman16 comments

That's not great, especially since SpaceX apparently expected the component to burn up in the atmosphere. Given there are thousands of them up there, and all must re-enter over the next decade or so, that's a lot of potential debris impacts on the ground.

Note that this was from a failed launch - this debris was not from old starlink satellites falling out of operating orbits.

These satellites deorbit into oceans, not land, if they're functioning.

https://archive.is/5ZljY

Primary source linked therein,

(.pdf) https://www.starlink.com/public-files/Starlink_Approach_to_S... ("Starlink Approach to Satellite Demisability")

- "On August 20, 2024, a 2.5 kg piece of aluminum was found on the ground in a farm in Saskatchewan, Canada, and determined by SpaceX engineers to have come from a Starlink satellite that reentered following the erroneous Falcon G9-3 deploy. The debris was traced by SpaceX engineers to a specific satellite and part – a modem enclosure lid of the backhaul antenna on a Starlink direct-to-cell satellite. This part was predicted to fully demise by both the NASA and ESA tools and is the only known Starlink fragment to have not done so."

This is only one of many reported - there's Canadian news coverage from earlier last year that SpaceX conveniently left out of their own report

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatoon/cp-space-junk-more-...

Same story featured in Scientific American: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/spacex-dropped-sp...

Oh wow, that's isn't a small piece. That's crazy big. Very dangerous.

Am I the only one who think: "Canadian government officials joking about that 'Musk is throwing now satellites at them'".

Orbital bombardment!

They should get some sort of compensation, even if no one was injured.

They did. Aluminum has good scrap value these days.

I should get some sort of compensation for seeing your comment – it caused pixels on my computer to change, even if it didn't hurt me.

On a more serious note, maybe if their courts allowed for the property owner to sue SpaceX for littering? Otherwise the actual damage is deminimis and courts generally don't allow compensation for "what-if"s.

I know you ... can't do better than this.

But ... private land is protected by the law while your HP Pavillion browsing the web is not. That's part of its intended use.

You're the judge and jury, how much should SpaceX pay the property owner for what happened?

I would do punitive damages, significant but not phenomenal, let's say 50k USD. To set a precedence and encourage them to make sure this kind of thing does not ever happen again.

Canadians catching all sorts of strays these days

Littering. That's a $250 fine

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