| |
| ▲ | ricardobeat a day ago | parent | next [-] | | That sounds... unlikely, to say the least. The ship blew up at 145km altitude over Turks and Caicos. Debris would fall thousands of kilometers to the east, if anything survives re-entry. EDIT: at these speeds, over 20000km/h, the falling debris will travel a very long way before coming down. For satellite re-entry, the usual estimated ground contact point is something like 8000km+ downrange [1]. There is little chance debris would come anywhere near commercial flight altitude in the area around where the videos were made. Apparently the planned splashdown was in the Indian Ocean near Australia, but this being an uncontrolled re-entry it could be far off from that, in either direction. [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009457652... | | |
| ▲ | s1artibartfast a day ago | parent | next [-] | | Im not sure what part you are skeptical about. The debris videos filmed at Turks and Caicos are about 800km east of the explosion video in the Bahamas. They appear to be real. Still high but coming down fast. Airspace is big, but I wouldn't want to fly a Jet with hundreds of people near it either. I imagine aviation radar towers would only have the most limited data as the event unfolded. | | | |
| ▲ | Retric a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Arlines are extremely cautious around these kinds of one off events. It’s not about the calculated risks, but the uncertainty around if they have the right information in the first place. Sure it may have broken up at 145km miles, but what if someone messed up and it actually was 14.5km etc. | | |
| ▲ | rvnx a day ago | parent | next [-] | | Main priority to prevent accidents is to migrate away from this imperial system. | | |
| ▲ | mh- a day ago | parent [-] | | You can forget to carry a 1 in metric, too. | | |
| ▲ | rvnx 14 hours ago | parent [-] | | It won't save everything will will reduce at least two possibles routes of mistake (wrong unit, or imprecise conversion). OP wrote "km miles", which would create an incident. SpaceX uses metric system for that exact reason, because in the past, on Mars, accident happened because of imperial measures. | | |
| ▲ | Retric 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yep, the point of saying “km miles” was the hypothetical uncertainty around units even for European airlines who use metric internationally. However, even within metric might be some question around units. |
|
|
| |
| ▲ | dmurray a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | No, airlines do not build in a safety factor sufficient to cover an important measurement being off by a factor of 10. They don't ground flights because the pilot might load 2,000 litres of fuel instead of 20,000 litres. They don't take evasive action in case the other plane is travelling at 5,000 knots instead of 500 knots. They don't insist on a 30-km runway because the runway published as 3 km might only be 300 metres. | | |
| ▲ | Retric a day ago | parent | next [-] | | You misunderstood what I’m saying. Airlines have systems to validate the amount of fuel loaded and currently aboard aircraft that have been battle tested across decades including fixes due to past issues etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Transat_Flight_236 They don’t have that level of certainty around what altitude a rocket exploded, or other one off event. | | | |
| ▲ | yuliyp 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Unlike fuel gauges, land surveys, and radar, fast-breaking news of explosions carries a significant risk of mistransmission or inaccuracy. They might know when/where the explosion occurred, but not necessarily have much confidence on how fast debris might have been ejected and in which directions. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6hIXB62bUE ATC was being extremely cautious and diverting planes over quite a large area for quite some time to avoid the risk of debris hitting airplanes. | |
| ▲ | andrewflnr 21 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Can you not understand the difference between a stated measurement of a runway or drain fuel requirement, and a stated location of a unique explosion that happened just a few minutes ago? Are you prepared to bet 200 lives that no one fat-fingered the number? | |
| ▲ | Evidlo a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | What if the information comes outside a system they control or organization they have no prior experience with? |
|
| |
| ▲ | jjk166 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > at these speeds, over 20000km/h, the falling debris will travel a very long way before coming down. Without air resistance, falling 145 km takes 172 seconds, which would result in the debris falling 956 km east of the explosion point if it were moving horizontal to the ground to begin with. With air resistance, it is substantially shorter as everything is decelerating proportional to the velocity cubed. If we approximate the terminal velocity of the debris as 500 km/h, to a first order approximation it would travel approximately 79 km east. The distance from West Caicos island to Grand Turk island is 138 km, for reference. Satellites are moving much faster and at much higher altitude. Starship was not in orbit. | |
| ▲ | seb1204 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Certainly causing delays. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-01-17/spacex-launch-to-go-a... | | | |
| ▲ | mh- a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I'm not at all qualified to speculate. So I'll just add that for those unfamiliar with him, the person who posted that tweet is an astrophysicist with a popular YT channel. | |
| ▲ | m4rtink a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yeah, most likely an understandable overreacting givent the fireworks. But better safe than sorry in this case. :-) |
| |
| ▲ | lysace a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | [flagged] | | |
| ▲ | mh- a day ago | parent | next [-] | | Can we not do this on HN, please? | | |
| ▲ | lysace a day ago | parent | next [-] | | Funny HN design detail: Once a comment has been added to a comment, the original commenter can't delete it's comment. Sometimes this is counterproductive to the goal of HN. | | |
| ▲ | mh- a day ago | parent [-] | | It is unfortunate sometimes. Probably a net gain to the signal-to-noise ratio, though? | | |
| ▲ | lysace a day ago | parent [-] | | I think it's a bad design. There should be a window of a few minutes to override it. I made a rash comment (not a very bad one, but I introduced politics for no reason), very quickly regretted it, but you were faster. Now many people will read this idiotic exchange instead of doing something more productive. |
|
| |
| ▲ | a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
| |
| ▲ | s1artibartfast a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | upvoted and flagged. | | |
|
|
