Fire destroys Starship on its seventh test flight, raining debris from space

The Federal Aviation Administration will likely require an investigation into the accident.

See full article...

 

[blackhawk887]

Debris doesn't burn up just because of falling from a high altitude. It burns up because of hitting the atmosphere at very high (such as near-orbital) speed. Ship 33 was at about 140 km up (which puts it above the Karman line, incidentally - i.e. officially "in space") and much more importantly moving at about 6 km/s (which is pretty damn fast) when it lost its engines and eventually broke up. Maybe not all 100% of the debris burned up, but most of it surely did.

I doubt that most of the ship burned up. It is by mass mostly made up of stainless steel, ablative and ceramic TPS, with some parts made of a few other materials like titanium and inconel. Those are all very heat resistant and will for the most part survuive rentry.

The Starlink demosats were probably aluminum, so they would have burned up. Electronics, batteries, wiring, hoses, or anything else made of copper, aluminum, plastic etc. would as well, but those are all probably a minority of the mass of the vehicle (not counting propellant).

 

[blackhawk887]

That’s a very good analogy to flying. The vast majority of time any one car drives there’s no accident. But what if 10% of the trips by a certain type of vehicle were to result in such a pileup? Would you even allow such a vehicle on the road?

Oversize load transporters cause a backup pretty much everywhere they go. So do rockets, for that matter:

 

[Mental Gear Reduction]

That there's lots of other pollution in the seas and on Earth doesn't mean that this pollution doesn't exist, that it's not a problem.

By the time SpaceX's launch cadence gets fast enough for their pollution to be meaningful in the larger context, they'll have gotten Starship operational, and will have reduced that pollution to just the expended fuel to reach orbit. It's still not nothing, but it's not that big a deal.

Also note that the meaningful pollution is about the same whether the rocket blows up or not. The methane gets burned up either way. The difference is that a bunch of mostly steel parts come tumbling down if it explodes. Earth organisms are used to dealing with lots of iron, because there's so much in the planet's crust, so the actual pollution difference between a successful launch and a LoV is tiny.

It would be more of a big deal if they were using super-toxic fuel, but it's just methane and oxygen.

 

[blackhawk887]

Feels like more costs should be on SpaceX, especially for RUD in the DRA. Cost of being in the rocket testing business. It would be a blip in the cost for SpaceX.

"Feels" aren't a good rationale for policy, and it's not like airlines are tiny businesses that are short on cash either. They do something like 100,000 flight hours a day just in the US, so a few dozen extra hours is not going to break the bank.

Rockets have every bit as much right to use the public airspace as airliners do. Both are essential form of transport that fill a very real public need. Regulators need to work out a balance that maintains safety and minimizes cost to both airlines and launch providers. Putting all the cost burden on one (or the other) isn't viable. And it simply isn't going to happen, so it's not worth much debate.

 

[Wickwick]

Oversize load transporters cause a backup pretty much everywhere they go. So do rockets, for that matter:

View attachment 100493

The closures associated with oversized loads are analogous to the exclusion zone set for each launch. They’re planned and published ahead of time. The emergency closures would be like an oversized load operator accidentally crossing into the road next to them shutting them as well. That would get them in trouble, certainly.

 

[Wickwick]

"Feels" aren't a good rationale for policy, and it's not like airlines are tiny businesses that are short on cash either. They do something like 100,000 flight hours a day just in the US, so a few dozen extra hours is not going to break the bank.

Rockets have every bit as much right to use the public airspace as airliners do. Both are essential form of transport that fill a very real public need. Regulators need to work out a balance that maintains safety and minimizes cost to both airlines and launch providers. Putting all the cost burden on one (or the other) isn't viable. And it simply isn't going to happen, so it's not worth much debate.

So far as I can tell, you haven’t advocated for any burden on rockets for their use. They get 100% exclusion zones at their launch site and the possibility of closing a thousands-mile long region down range in the event of an accident. What accommodations do rockets have to make? A violation of their range can prevent their launch, but that’s not a government-imposed restriction. That’s literally a violation of a benefit the launcher is offered.

At least from Canaveral, SpaceX has agreed to not launch Starlinks at prime air travel time. And the FAA limited BO to the graveyard shift. Would you at least advocate for restricting Starship launches similarly?

You again equated the rockets and aircraft. The size of air transport and the value of the goods and people it moves are way bigger than anything space related.

 

[blackhawk887]

So far as I can tell, you haven’t advocated for any burden on rockets for their use.

There doesn't seem to be any shortage of people doing so. I'd don't have to add to it.

They get 100% exclusion zones at their launch site and the possibility of closing a thousands-mile long region down range in the event of an accident. What accommodations do rockets have to make? A violation of their range can prevent their launch, but that’s not a government-imposed restriction. That’s literally a violation of a benefit the launcher is offered.

At least from Canaveral, SpaceX has agreed to not launch Starlinks at prime air travel time. And the FAA limited BO to the graveyard shift. Would you at least advocate for restricting Starship launches similarly? You again equated the rockets and aircraft. The size of air transport and the value of the goods and people it moves are way bigger than anything space related.

Why is overall size relevant? Only the size of the intersection betwen the two matters. Very, very few aircraft flights (on the order of 0.1%) are affected by rocket launches, while on the order of 100% of rocket flights are impacted by aircraft.

What accommodations do rockets have to make? Rocket closures are temporary, while aircraft get airspace that is almost exclusively dedicated to them. Launch zones are required to be approved by regulators days in advance, and launch providers can't deviate from the pre-planned closures on short notice, while aircraft can, for the most part, fly whenever and wherever they want (I know they need flight plans and clearance, but it's NOWHERE near as invasive or restrictive as launch planning).

Shorter launch windows and time of day restrictions would be generally reasonable in most cases.

 

[DancesWithBikers]

Not being Elon Musk. Quite proud of it, actually.

Congrats! That makes you quite unique. One of around 8 billion.

 

[Speakertoanimals]

The closures associated with oversized loads are analogous to the exclusion zone set for each launch. They’re planned and published ahead of time. The emergency closures would be like an oversized load operator accidentally crossing into the road next to them shutting them as well. That would get them in trouble, certainly.

Conversely, this is also why you don't see too many autos in space. Last I heard, there is a Tesla out toward Mars, but it can't find a charging station.

 

[uhuznaa]

It's 2500km down range. What do you consider the minimum limit? Ariane 6 approaches West Africa at 5000km. Low inclination launches from KSC do so at 7000km. Launches to ISS would impact Ireland at 6000km, and polar launches intentionally cross Cuba at just 600km. Israel launches westward over the Med, and you can get out to sea without crossing over land somewhere. Iran launches from the middle of their country, and only has a narrow corridor that doesn't immediately overfly someone else. China launches from the middle of their country. Russia launches from the middle of someone else's country. North Korea overflies Japan for giggles. New Zealand is nearly halfway around the world before they hit West Africa (geography must be tired of Liberia and their commemorative plates...) The only "safe" options are south out of Vandenberg or Kodiak, where you're basically in orbit before you risk landing on someone. And then of course once you're in orbit, you have to come down at some point, and then everyone is fair game. We should just forget this whole space idea entirely and stay on the ground.

To be fair, most people don't feel very strongly about this whole space idea, they just don't care one way or another. But give them an opportunity to poke with a pointy stick at Elon Musk and they will happily give up on anything space-related just for that.

Here you may meet people who love space more than they hate Musk, but generally it seems to be exactly the other way round.

 

[frank1470]

President Trump in his inaugural address: "We will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars."

 

[Celery Man]

To be fair, most people don't feel very strongly about this whole space idea, they just don't care one way or another. But give them an opportunity to poke with a pointy stick at Elon Musk and they will happily give up on anything space-related just for that.

Here you may meet people who love space more than they hate Musk, but generally it seems to be exactly the other way round.

Why do you have to like one over the other? Can’t you love space and hate Musk equally?

 

[wagnerrp]

The closures associated with oversized loads are analogous to the exclusion zone set for each launch. They’re planned and published ahead of time. The emergency closures would be like an oversized load operator accidentally crossing into the road next to them shutting them as well. That would get them in trouble, certainly.

I don't like that analogy. This wasn't an unexpected event. This was a planned contingency, which was activated. It would be like a survey team saying they're marginal at some intersection, and five minutes may turn into five hours if they have to do some demo.

The real problem is that the airlines themselves didn't plan for it. They could have advanced or delayed flights outside the window. They could have changed routes or added fuel to mitigate the consequences. None of this happened.

Now one possibility is that they were fully informed, gambled, and lost. In that case, better luck next time. It's far more likely there was a communications break down, and they were not fully informed. Some aircraft were hitting critical fuel state with no viable airports except those on the other side of the DRA. They never should have been permitted to file a flight plan where that was an understood possibility. The ATC comms were surely chaos with controllers reporting the closure would last 99 minutes, which really means "indefinite, but we cannot actually say indefinite".

There's unsubstantiated claims that some debris might have fallen outside the DRA, but if that did not happen, then I see no fault with SpaceX here. They stayed within the permits of their license. However, with all parties now informed, I don't see SpaceX getting the same license again. Airlines don't have a veto, but they have a noisy voice.

 

[uhuznaa]

Why do you have to like one over the other? Can’t you love space and hate Musk equally?

As I said: if you hate Musk more than you love space you will prefer whatever is bad for Musk even if it will be bad for spaceflight. And most people don't care very much about spaceflight at all. What you (or I) can or can't do doesn't matter very much here.

I can perfectly isolate my opinions about Musk from my opinions about spaceflight, but if I look around many people can't do that or don't want to even try. They don't care for spaceflight or even think it's just a waste of money. They ignore it normally more or less but that's already the best you can hope for.

 

[RandyJ]

Better to have this happen now than with $500M of satellites aboard.

 

[fl4Ksh]

The Shuttle SRBs had an FTS, and they were activated some seconds after the Challenger exploded, after the range launch safety officer saw the SRBs flying out of the explosion. The external tank also had a separate FTS that could be independently activated (but wasn't). As far as I can tell, however, the orbiter itself did not. The Rogers report mentions separate FTSes for the SRBs and the external tank, but apparently not for the orbiter.

https://www.nasa.gov/history/rogersrep/v1ch9.htm

Certainly the orbiter, if it had an FTS, did not have its FTS activated. Much later investigation of the accident showed that the crew survived the original breakup, and almost certainly died on impact with the ocean.

The Crew Compartment on the Challenger disaster cleanly separated from the Orbiter at the interface between the CC and the Payload Bay. It fell intact from about 70,000 feet altitude and 2.5 minutes later it ended up at the bottom of the ocean at 90 ft depth. No survivors.

 

[wagnerrp]

Better to have this happen now than with $500M of satellites aboard.

SpaceX has the option to transition customers from Falcon to Starship, but they won't do so until Starship is at a similar reliability to Falcon, according to insurance rates. For the a long time, they're going to be launching Starlinks and propellant. Propellant is cheap, and if it cost them $500M for a 100t of Starlink satellites, they wouldn't be able to afford launching them as rapidly as they currently are.

 

[Wickwick]

I don't like that analogy. This wasn't an unexpected event. This was a planned contingency, which was activated. It would be like a survey team saying they're marginal at some intersection, and five minutes may turn into five hours if they have to do some demo.

The real problem is that the airlines themselves didn't plan for it. They could have advanced or delayed flights outside the window. They could have changed routes or added fuel to mitigate the consequences. None of this happened.

Now one possibility is that they were fully informed, gambled, and lost. In that case, better luck next time. It's far more likely there was a communications break down, and they were not fully informed. Some aircraft were hitting critical fuel state with no viable airports except those on the other side of the DRA. They never should have been permitted to file a flight plan where that was an understood possibility. The ATC comms were surely chaos with controllers reporting the closure would last 99 minutes, which really means "indefinite, but we cannot actually say indefinite".

There's unsubstantiated claims that some debris might have fallen outside the DRA, but if that did not happen, then I see no fault with SpaceX here. They stayed within the permits of their license. However, with all parties now informed, I don't see SpaceX getting the same license again. Airlines don't have a veto, but they have a noisy voice.

I see no fault with SpaceX as per the current regime. But a contingency plan that is only activated at times but requires the airlines to carry more fuel *every *time (whether the rocket actually even launches or not) is a real cost to the launch being carried by others. Causing harm (costs) to others to execute your normal course of business is generally not tenable. One typically has to pay the aggrieved party. When the municipal water company started a new water treatment plant they dropped new wells. They had to pay to install municipal water hookups to nearby properties that had previously had their own wells because the normal course of business was going to harm third parties. Access to ground water is a regulated activity where I am. It's a shared resources. And yet, damages had to be offset.

Externalizing an industry's operating costs to others is how the petroleum industry got so rich and we all got so fucked. Is that really how we want the world to run?

 

[YetAnotherBoris]

SpaceX has the option to transition customers from Falcon to Starship, but they won't do so until Starship is at a similar reliability to Falcon, according to insurance rates. For the a long time, they're going to be launching Starlinks and propellant. Propellant is cheap, and if it cost them $500M for a 100t of Starlink satellites, they wouldn't be able to afford launching them as rapidly as they currently are.

Yeah, I doubt it's going to be $10M per Starlink v3 satellite (with Block 2 Pez Ships expected to accommodate a maximum of 54 satellites per launch.) Those satellites will be mass-produced at a factory, not custom-built one-off wonders. No official numbers are available, but people have thrown around conservative estimates of ~$1M per v2 Mini. V3 is going to be larger and more expensive (at least initially), but not 10× larger and more expensive (and not 40× more expensive than V1, which reportedly cost $250k each).

 

[barrattm]

That is one of the craziest claims I have ever seen on Ars.

You are pretty much literally claiming here that your fearmongering about imaginary outcomes is more important than actual facts.

Er, safety planning is exactly imagining outcomes and fearing them, and then calculating if they can occur. That’s why one mitigates against them.

And if it turns out that indeed yes, SpaceX has dropped debris onto inhabited land as reports indicate, it’d not be a matter of imagination. It’d be a matter of fact.

 

[wagnerrp]

I see no fault with SpaceX as per the current regime. But a contingency plan that is only activated at times but requires the airlines to carry more fuel *every *time (whether the rocket actually even launches or not) is a real cost to the launch being carried by others. Causing harm (costs) to others to execute your normal course of business is generally not tenable. One typically has to pay the aggrieved party. When the municipal water company started a new water treatment plant they dropped new wells. They had to pay to install municipal water hookups to nearby properties that had previously had their own wells because the normal course of business was going to harm third parties. Access to ground water is a regulated activity where I am. It's a shared resources. And yet, damages had to be offset.

Externalizing an industry's operating costs to others is how the petroleum industry got so rich and we all got so fucked. Is that really how we want the world to run?

That's how the airlines run. If they're flying out of an airport, that means someone else can't fly out of that airport (admittedly they're leasing gate space for that privilege). There's limited runway capacity, limited airspace capacity. They're already vying against each other for limited resources. Rocket launches are just one more party to that competition, and this is just a discussion on what is considered a "fair portion" of that resource.

Water rights are different because they're rights. Those existing well users had the right to that water, and that right was being taken away. That does require compensation.

IFT7 had a 60 minute window, and that was effectively extended to ~100 minutes by the activation of the DRA. If that's too long, then make it an instantaneous window, so you just have the DRA itself. Departing aircraft can hold on the ground, and be permitted to take off as soon as the launch passes. Arriving aircraft could be scheduled around that one hour window. It would effectively turn the DRA into a full exclusion zone, but one likely to be canceled early.

 

[barrattm]

It's 2500km down range. What do you consider the minimum limit? Ariane 6 approaches West Africa at 5000km. Low inclination launches from KSC do so at 7000km. Launches to ISS would impact Ireland at 6000km, and polar launches intentionally cross Cuba at just 600km. Israel launches westward over the Med, and you can get out to sea without crossing over land somewhere. Iran launches from the middle of their country, and only has a narrow corridor that doesn't immediately overfly someone else. China launches from the middle of their country. Russia launches from the middle of someone else's country. North Korea overflies Japan for giggles. New Zealand is nearly halfway around the world before they hit West Africa (geography must be tired of Liberia and their commemorative plates...) The only "safe" options are south out of Vandenberg or Kodiak, where you're basically in orbit before you risk landing on someone. And then of course once you're in orbit, you have to come down at some point, and then everyone is fair game. We should just forget this whole space idea entirely and stay on the ground.

Launching eastbound out of Florida, the vehicle is either in orbit or in the Atlantic before reaching Ireland. Same for French Guiana / Africa.

For example, whilst the Shuttle was aiming for about 300km height and would get there about 8000km downrange, it would reach 160km at about 3000km down range. At that height, it'd not be coming down straight away and would be able to do at least one trip round the planet, missing Ireland. Before that point, if the FTS went off the debris would still have another 3000km to go, to fall into the ocean,

Japan's Tsubame satellite orbited at 167km.

There is of course the transition between ascent to orbit, and being in orbit, and during this phase an engine shutdown might leave the vehicle with the energy to reach the other side of the ocean, if it stayed intact. That's what an ICBM does.

It looks like this is effectively when StarShip blew up; it was out of most of the atmosphere and accelerating hard, but hadn't reached orbit. So it does feel like 2500km is a bit squeaky tight to me.

I don't know how the Cubans feel about polar launches. Iran, Russia and China have the advantage of not having to care about hitting their own territory (or some area that is powerless to complain). North Korea does indeed fly over Japan, and sometimes they have had failures and come to earth on Japan. Japan complains most thoroughly about it.

Geo Politics
There is a geopolitical angle to all this. China has genuinely reasonable launch corridors on its coast. China can also use its sheer size and grip on internal politics to launch at whatever rate they want and have no one else able to complain about it. The USA is also similarly large, but has a government that is more inclined to properly consider the needs of the US population and their surroundings.

So in the great space race, China can probably out-launch the USA (all other things being equal).

And if one considers what the US could do about that without compromising its commitment to be a decent State, there's no easy options open to it. The eastern seaboard is full. Puerto Rico is so nearly ideal but not quite; there's the other islands to the east. It needs somewhere else.

Trinidad and Tobago are well placed, as is Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname (just), and of course French Guiana. I'm presuming Brazil wouldnt' be an option. There's some well placed countries in Africa, including Somalia, Kenya, Madagascar and Tanzania. Japan. A few Pacific islands. And if it comes to that, Hawaii isn't too bad a bet. Boca Chica always felt like a "scraping the bottom of the barrel" option for mainland USA.

On the whole, it feels like the US needs to get out there with well mannered diplomats and negotiate a long-lasting presence somewhere strategic. Guyana or Trinidad & Tobago, with the former having more area available. Investing well, carefully, sensitively and in sufficiently large quantities to make sure the Chinese don't buy up the place first may well pay long term dividends in the coming decades.

Or, it could just do a deal with the French, go to French Guiana. And in fact, merging the European and US space efforts out of mutual interests would be a good thing generally. Better a unified effort than a divided one. Admittedly, getting the Europeans to buy into that could be tricky...

 

[eyesoars]

Feels like more costs should be on SpaceX, especially for RUD in the DRA. Cost of being in the rocket testing business. It would be a blip in the cost for SpaceX.

Sure, raise the market entry barriers even higher. SpaceX, ULA, Northrop Grumman, and the whole military industrial complex will thank you.

 

[OrvGull]

The real problem is that the airlines themselves didn't plan for it. They could have advanced or delayed flights outside the window. They could have changed routes or added fuel to mitigate the consequences. None of this happened.

Launch windows slip, and launches are constantly canceled and rescheduled, often at the last minute. (The current launch at Vandenberg has been announced and rescheduled three times.)That makes them hard to work around for an industry where profits rely on tight scheduling.

Again, if what you want to say is "airline passengers should pay more in order to subsidize billionaires' space launches," just say so.

 

[wagnerrp]

Launching eastbound out of Florida, the vehicle is either in orbit or in the Atlantic before reaching Ireland. Same for French Guiana / Africa.

Launching eastbound out of Texas, the vehicle is in orbit before reaching Turks and Caicos, and yet....

As you transition from suborbital to orbital while ascending, your IIP will sweep at least halfway around the world, more so if you've got significant positive radial velocity. Now by the time your IIP is 6000km down range, it's traveling very rapidly, and the risk is minimal, but it is not zero. There is a brief moment on launch towards ISS where a failure will drop debris on Ireland. In fact, there are recovery crews deployed to Shannon airport for such a scenario. Orbiter had various abort sites in the UK, France, Spain, and Portugal, for various launch inclinations.

So there is certainly a cutoff distance where the risk is determined to be sufficiently minimal. What do you think that distance should be, and what's your reasoning?

For example, whilst the Shuttle was aiming for about 300km height and would get there about 8000km downrange, it would reach 160km at about 3000km down range. At that height, it'd not be coming down straight away and would be able to do at least one trip round the planet, missing Ireland. Before that point, if the FTS went off the debris would still have another 3000km to go, to fall into the ocean

See above. They would "miss Ireland" only because they were targeting a landing site at RAF Fairford.

Trinidad and Tobago are well placed, as is Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname (just), and of course French Guiana. I'm presuming Brazil wouldnt' be an option. There's some well placed countries in Africa, including Somalia, Kenya, Madagascar and Tanzania. Japan. A few Pacific islands. And if it comes to that, Hawaii isn't too bad a bet. Boca Chica always felt like a "scraping the bottom of the barrel" option for mainland USA.

Boca Chica was supposed to be used for Falcon Heavy launches to GTO, in which case the restrictive launch azimuth wasn't really a problem. Then the GTO market fell out, and SpaceX transitioned to LEO launches, and specifically Starlink. Neither of those are great from that location, so it's likely to be limited to just a development and manufacturing site. With proximity to a natural gas export terminal, and local solar and wind resources to power fractional distillation, it might work for a low volume refueling station. There has been discussion around complex maneuvering that might permit flights over southern Mexico, but I doubt that's going to happen.

The big problem with siting is that there's two competing requirements. On the one hand, you need oceanfront property with no one around for several miles. On the other hand, you need significant local infrastructure for support, or a convenient deep water harbor to bring those resources in yourself. That basically doesn't exist. Either there's too many people, or not enough people. The much more likely option is an offshore platform. Italy started off this trend. Sealaunch continued. One of the Chinese semi-private firms is now experimenting with it. SpaceX bought two old oil platforms to hedge their bets if they couldn't work the permitting for Boca Chica. In the end, they just ended up cannibalizing them for crane parts and selling the rest for scrap. They're allowed to launch up to 25/yr from Boca Chica, and I doubt they'll exceed that.

On the whole, it feels like the US needs to get out there with well mannered diplomats and negotiate a long-lasting presence somewhere strategic. Guyana or Trinidad & Tobago, with the former having more area available. Investing well, carefully, sensitively and in sufficiently large quantities to make sure the Chinese don't buy up the place first may well pay long term dividends in the coming decades.

Or, it could just do a deal with the French, go to French Guiana. And in fact, merging the European and US space efforts out of mutual interests would be a good thing generally. Better a unified effort than a divided one. Admittedly, getting the Europeans to buy into that could be tricky...

I don't see either of these happening until Starship is a fully developed platform, and SpaceX knows exactly what they need and want out of their launch infrastructure. They can't be developing on-the-fly in some remote site. There's 2.5M people in the lower RGV region. Corpus Christi is 2hrs away, San Antonio 4hrs, Houston 6hrs, and Dallas 8hrs, all by well developed roads. There's an enormous amount of industrial and commercial capacity to pull from. Kourou only has 25K people, and just 300K in the whole department. Guyana is even smaller. Brazil has lots of people, but Brazil is larger than the continental US, and very few of them are up north near French Guiana. Tobago is out, and you'll have trouble finding a sufficiently remote site on the eastern coast of Trinidad.

Or you build all the equipment you need into a portable rig, in a well staffed port, and ship it where ever you want.

 

[wagnerrp]

Launch windows slip, and launches are constantly canceled and rescheduled, often at the last minute. (The current launch at Vandenberg has been announced and rescheduled three times.)That makes them hard to work around for an industry where profits rely on tight scheduling.

Again, if what you want to say is "airline passengers should pay more in order to subsidize billionaires' space launches," just say so.

You cut the very next paragraph where I suggested the lack of planning may not even be their fault.

 

[Elessedil]

The fine was a joke.

That reminds me of the itemized bill that Grumman (who made the Apollo LEM) sent to North American Rockwell (who made the Apollo command module) after Apollo 13…for “towing services”…at then-typical tow-truck rate of $4 for the first mile and $1 each additional mile. It was played straight but was 100% a joke.

http://web.archive.org/web/20071031080918/http://www.geocities.com/capecanaveral/4411/apollo13.htm

 

[NetMage]

That reminds me of the itemized bill that Grumman (who made the Apollo LEM) sent to North American Rockwell (who made the Apollo command module) after Apollo 13…

A color photo of the actual invoice is in my Photos on my phone - along with Buzz Aldrin’s Travel Expense Statement.

 

[barrattm]

So there is certainly a cutoff distance where the risk is determined to be sufficiently minimal. What do you think that distance should be, and what's your reasoning?

See above. They would "miss Ireland" only because they were targeting a landing site at RAF Fairford.

Judging by the reports such as this from NBC, probably not 2500km.

SpaceX may have got unlucky and as the impact point swept out towards the Atlantic and passed over the Ts&Cs Islands, that's when it exploded. But, improbable adverse manmade events that do actually happen often change opinions on what an acceptable calculated probability is.

An intact Shuttle would under some aborts reach across the Atlantic, but my understanding is that had it disintegrated before reaching a minimum ~160km orbit then the resulting debris could not.

 

[EllPeaTea]

Nice video from Scott Manley on how the whole NOTAM stuff works in relation to rocket launches.

Spoiler: YouTube embed

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLGJR0hPKFE

 

[eyesoars]

Judging by the reports such as this from NBC, probably not 2500km.

SpaceX may have got unlucky and as the impact point swept out towards the Atlantic and passed over the Ts&Cs Islands, that's when it exploded. But, improbable adverse manmade events that do actually happen often change opinions on what an acceptable calculated probability is.

An intact Shuttle would under some aborts reach across the Atlantic, but my understanding is that had it disintegrated before reaching a minimum ~160km orbit then the resulting debris could not.

Color me skeptical: I have trouble imagining all three main engines completely melting and disintegrating before reaching Earth.

I won't say that NASA and/or Rockwell did or didn't claim this, but ....

And I'm even more skeptical that shuttle tiles wouldn't have survived. They're small, and wouldn't have hurt much, but IMO many of them would have survived.

 

[BrangdonJ]

I don't like that analogy. This wasn't an unexpected event. This was a planned contingency, which was activated. It would be like a survey team saying they're marginal at some intersection, and five minutes may turn into five hours if they have to do some demo.

The real problem is that the airlines themselves didn't plan for it. They could have advanced or delayed flights outside the window. They could have changed routes or added fuel to mitigate the consequences. None of this happened.

Now one possibility is that they were fully informed, gambled, and lost. In that case, better luck next time. It's far more likely there was a communications break down, and they were not fully informed. Some aircraft were hitting critical fuel state with no viable airports except those on the other side of the DRA. They never should have been permitted to file a flight plan where that was an understood possibility. The ATC comms were surely chaos with controllers reporting the closure would last 99 minutes, which really means "indefinite, but we cannot actually say indefinite".
[...]

My impression is that notices to airmen are so full of clutter that it's hard to tell signal from the noise. In addition, most launches don't fail, so there's an element of crying "wolf", making the potential restrictions part of the noise. You could say the airlines were fully informed, but you could also say they were informed in a way that made them likely to ignore it. If I were seeking reform, that's one area I would look at. And it goes way beyond space launch, and may be intrinsically hard to fix.

 

[uhuznaa]

Color me skeptical: I have trouble imagining all three main engines completely melting and disintegrating before reaching Earth.

I won't say that NASA and/or Rockwell did or didn't claim this, but ....

And I'm even more skeptical that shuttle tiles wouldn't have survived. They're small, and wouldn't have hurt much, but IMO many of them would have survived.

One source of trouble for Starship in this regard may turn out it being so huge and made out of so resilient materials. Normally a failure of an upper stage at such velocities (with the FTS firing and the craft disintegrating) means that almost all of it will burn up. If you have 100 tons of stainless steel though... you'd need the FTS to basically pulverize it.

The shuttle with its big engines already was marginal here as far as upper stages go, but at least it was almost exclusively aluminum. Starship is mostly steel. To be fully safe you probably would have to launch in a way that the impact point never crosses over populated land (or air traffic) until reaching orbit.

 

[BrangdonJ]

At least from Canaveral, SpaceX has agreed to not launch Starlinks at prime air travel time. And the FAA limited BO to the graveyard shift. Would you at least advocate for restricting Starship launches similarly?

Maybe. It sounds reasonable on the face of it. I honestly don't know what issues led to SpaceX apparently having more freedom over the launch times than Blue Origin (if that is indeed the case). Did they have restrictions that didn't apply to Blue? For example, is it because SpaceX were hoping to land the second stage and needed that to happen in certain lighting conditions?

Or was it thought their vehicle was more reliable than one that had never flown before? If so, then that assessment was probably misjudged: the number of changes to the second stage should have had it treated as a new vehicle.

 

[Mental Gear Reduction]

And I'm even more skeptical that shuttle tiles wouldn't have survived. They're small, and wouldn't have hurt much, but IMO many of them would have survived.

Absolutely, but having touched a shuttle tile: they are extremely lightweight. They're related to aerogels. Their terminal velocity will be so low that they're not going to damage anything on their own.

If one dropped from space and hit you directly on the head, you probably wouldn't even say ouch. Maybe if it hit you with a corner, it might leave a tiny bruise.

 

[blackhawk887]

I don't like that analogy. This wasn't an unexpected event. This was a planned contingency, which was activated. It would be like a survey team saying they're marginal at some intersection, and five minutes may turn into five hours if they have to do some demo.

The real problem is that the airlines themselves didn't plan for it. They could have advanced or delayed flights outside the window. They could have changed routes or added fuel to mitigate the consequences. None of this happened.

Now one possibility is that they were fully informed, gambled, and lost. In that case, better luck next time. It's far more likely there was a communications break down, and they were not fully informed. Some aircraft were hitting critical fuel state with no viable airports except those on the other side of the DRA. They never should have been permitted to file a flight plan where that was an understood possibility. The ATC comms were surely chaos with controllers reporting the closure would last 99 minutes, which really means "indefinite, but we cannot actually say indefinite".

There's unsubstantiated claims that some debris might have fallen outside the DRA, but if that did not happen, then I see no fault with SpaceX here. They stayed within the permits of their license. However, with all parties now informed, I don't see SpaceX getting the same license again. Airlines don't have a veto, but they have a noisy voice.

Scott Manley said that he talked to some flight dispatchers (who plan routes for airlines) who said that they don't see DRAs, and that those only go out to ATC. That seems like a big miss on the FAA's part, if they aren't even giving the airline the opportunity to prepare for a contingency.

He also said that the boundary of the DRA is at the 10^-7 risk (of casualty?) line.