I know you're not exactly serious, but to answer anyway: McMurdo isn't near this flight path, it's at New Zealand's longitude (so 2000 miles east of Australia) and much farther south. Perth would be the closest airport for almost all of that flight path.
(Your core point is correct, this trajectory is about as remote as SpaceX can possibly get, even if it's near a small number of flights. Let's not extend NIMBYism to space and ban SpaceX from everywhere.)
This is an interesting article about what is considered the most remote point on earth:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/point-n...
A lot of satellite debris is targeted there but of course we cannot expect all space debris to be so controlled and in this case SpaceX went for a region that was quite remote.
But why does SpaceX need so much of that space? It's a massive ocean - drop the satellites somewhere else, or at a time there aren't airlines in the way.
I don't think there are diversion points, you either keep going to destination or turn around. The A380 is rated for ETOPS-330, that's 5hr30min from a diversion airport.
Why would Qantas have the implicit right to the airspace first? Space travel and air travel are both value-added human activities. I can't see why we would always prioritize air travel (particularly in very remote locations like this) over space travel.
> Is this [SpaceX flight] for the benefit of humanity?
Yes. Much more so than that one weird flight that's "merely profitable for a single company".
> Do we all get a profit sharing check at some point?
Yes, in the form of more space sector jobs, more jobs and economic benefits that come from more kinds of useful stuff being launched to space more often, and eventually - hopefully - more jobs in space and economic benefits coming from that.
That really downplays the amount of collaboration needed to make a flight like this happen. The airplane was designed and built by tons of people in lots of different counties, building on a century of aviation industry knowledge. The amount of work and experience that goes into making a machine that can safely be 5+ hours from a landing site is enormous.
> This is comically common, but because it has SpaceX in the name, it makes headlines.
I once had a flight from Puerto Rico to Chicago delayed because of a (SpaceX) launch at Cape Canaveral that happened exactly within the planned launch window. On the plus side, the flight was delayed just barely enough to be “safe” - we got to watch the second stage separation off in the distance just by looking out the window at whatever the 737 cruising altitude is.
I’d guess that space launches just aren’t numerous enough to bother modifying commercial aviation schedules, so they don’t (SpaceX or not). When it looks like a launch is actually going to happen and not get scrubbed, they clear a hole in the sky and then get on with their day.
Space launches have a significant impact on aviation schedules at Orlando and a massive impact on cruise schedules from Canaveral. There has been significant effort towards tightening the size of the keepout windows in both space and time.
I agree - it is quite funny that it is getting attention. It's like a combination of Elon being on X and getting attention and SEO creating some infinite loop of everything revolving around him. Please stop.
More importantly can someone remind me what warning did the Chinese rockets provide or competitors? Not that that is a standard we should measure against.
Well, some of their chief competitors (i.e. Ariane 5) don't even do a controlled re-entry of their upper stages, so they don't issue warnings at all. They reenter anywhere on the planet at an unannounced random time and place. In a sense SpaceX is a victim of its own success here.
Falcon 9 destroys its upper stages in a controlled manner, in a deliberately chosen re-entry zone (sparsely populated ocean). Ariane 5's cryogenic upper stage can't do this: it's a liquid-hydrogen engine without a relight ability—after it turns off once, you can't reignite it a second time (for a re-entry targeting burn).
Their biggest competitor is China, who likes to drop their boosters on Chinese villages. Understandably, the villagers don't complain about this too loudly.
And with that the total number of rocket flights per year has ramped up due to SpaceX. Same thing applies to Starlink satellites "ruining" the night sky. It was a bit of an issue before, but now that there are thousands of satellites up there from one company, they're making headlines for similar reasons.
...which result in far less debris making its way down to earth since they commoditised the re-use of launch hardware. Had these launches been performed by ULA or Arianespace or any of the other incumbents there'd be much more debris dropping to the seabed or - in the case of Russian and Chinese launchers - to the desert (Russia) or haphazardly strewn around populated areas (China [1]).
It's impressive how the modern tactic is to turn everyone into a victim. Even the wealthiest person in the world, who also has power even beyond their wealth - even they use the tactic.
> Qantas says it has been forced to delay several of its flights to South Africa at the last minute due to warnings of falling debris from Elon Musk’s SpaceX rockets re-entering Earth.
Amusingly I think it's great that Elon had a very public divorce with Silicon Valley. Otherwise I could easily see this having been titled "Qantas South Africa flights delayed by falling debris from Silicon Valley based SpaceX rocket" for maximum clicks.
The solution here is for Spacex to tighten up their planned reentry corridors. At this point they should have more than enough experience in their ops to narrow down the likely debris field to a narrow strip that can be easily flown around instead of the huge swath of Indian Ocean they'd been allowing for.
It says they had to delay several flights over a period of a few weeks. Starship isn’t flying anywhere near that often. These are routine Falcon 9 flights and they should be able to have very tight windows in time and space.
My reading is that SpaceX was loose with their windows because it’s easier and they didn’t think it mattered in a remote part of the ocean. Now that there’s an actual reason, they’ll probably tighten it up.
Remember that part of the current testing program includes testing whether or not they can reliably relight their engines on orbit in order to do things like a controlled re-entry. Given the nature of that testing I imagine there's very little room for narrowing their re-entry corridors. If the test succeeds they may re-enter earlier and if it fails they'll re-enter later... or laterally different... either way lighting up the engines for the test probably changes the trajectory of the spacecraft.
The one thing they can do is be sure the original trajectory that gets them to space intersects the Earth within some reason so that if things don't go as planned it doesn't go too far afield.
At best this article is a complaint about communication of whether or not a launch is happening. And even that's hard to really do reasonably: weather, maybe a stuck valve during the countdown, maybe a leisure boat close to the launch site enters the exclusion area... all of those things have happened and prompted changes in launch times and many of those things are outside of SpaceX control.
So seems to me you can lock up the airspace on a "just in case" basis with lots of advanced warning but also reserving lots of time that you won't really need in the end... you know... just in case... , or lock it up much less, but at the cost of relatively short notice to others that might want to use it. Either way you'd still get the article protesting... it's just the complaint would be different.
They will be tightening them as the starship program continues. It's just still in a testing stage right now.
I also want to point out SpaceX still does a better job than some competitors (ahem, ariane, which gets a pass because it's the eurocrat's baby therefore must be good)
The solution here is for them to nail landings. This is a temporary problem during testing. Hopefully there will only be one or two more launches that reenter over the Indian Ocean before they start landing the ship at the launch pad instead.
Their last few rentries have been extremely tight, doing simulated landings on the water right next to a prepositioned camera buoy. The position of the buoy is almost certainly less precise than the rocket itself.
Is it typical that anyone gets compensated for a temporary road closure? From what I understand this is one of the safest areas for space debris to re-enter, so likely it's justified and just part of having both spaceflight and aviation industries.
The article doesn't explicitly mention it but this debris will be from spent Falcon 9 upper stages which aren't reusable. The area will continue to be a dumping ground for space junk regardless of Starship, but less of it will be coming from SpaceX.
Sounds like tracking would help. If the re-entry is controlled, why not broadcast transponder info from the reentering parts so they appear on airplane displays? Then they can adjust course, just as they do any other aircraft in their flight path.
The south indian ocean is the re-entry site for the 2nd stage of their next starship flight test, which will (should) re-enter in one piece so the risk of falling debris is certainly not trivial and unfortunately the size of the hazard region is also not trivial.
They've rescheduled a few times now and each time operators flying in this region have to shuffle things around.
My point exactly. Airplanes are big too, and there are existing procedures to avoid collision with marked objects in the sky e.g. other planes.
By listening to the transponder messages which give altitude, GPS location, velocity and call sign you can 'see' the stage as it moves through the air like any other vehicle traffic.
Yes and also, these parts are not made for pristine reentry, it's very likely they'll split up in different parts. How do you make sure every part has a transponder and it doesn't burn up?
The odds of damage are essentially 0 even if there was no diversion. The background risk of a plane crashing with mechanical failures may dwarf this risk.
It's hard to emphasize how comically vast the region described is. Its like... shooting two marbles across Manhattan and colliding.
https://www.flightaware.com/live/flight/QFA63/history/202501...
This is one of the more remote flights humanity operates. What even are the diversion points on this route, McMurdo airfield?
I'm not an Elon shrill but this seems as an ideal place for SpaceX to be re-entering things as they can choose with minimal damage to ecosystems.
I know you're not exactly serious, but to answer anyway: McMurdo isn't near this flight path, it's at New Zealand's longitude (so 2000 miles east of Australia) and much farther south. Perth would be the closest airport for almost all of that flight path.
(Your core point is correct, this trajectory is about as remote as SpaceX can possibly get, even if it's near a small number of flights. Let's not extend NIMBYism to space and ban SpaceX from everywhere.)
This is an interesting article about what is considered the most remote point on earth: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/point-n... A lot of satellite debris is targeted there but of course we cannot expect all space debris to be so controlled and in this case SpaceX went for a region that was quite remote.
But why does SpaceX need so much of that space? It's a massive ocean - drop the satellites somewhere else, or at a time there aren't airlines in the way.
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I’m a bit surprised the Southern Indian Ocean wasn’t prioritized. That is even more remote.
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I don't think there are diversion points, you either keep going to destination or turn around. The A380 is rated for ETOPS-330, that's 5hr30min from a diversion airport.
Incase anyone is wondering about ETOPS-N
For example, if an aircraft is rated for ETOPS-180, it means that it is able to fly with full load and just one engine for three hours. [1]
Obviously in this case it 5hours 30 minutes on one engine at full load.
-- Slight edit: Unclear if with a 4 engine its rated with 2 functional or still 1 functional engine.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ETOPS#Usage
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> The A380 is rated for ETOPS-330
I thought ETOPS is for 2 engine aircraft. Are there minimum diversionary requirements for 4 engine aircraft?
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You are correct. Diversion points are Perth or Durban. Nowhere else.
It's incredible a 14 hour flight can run with that level of certainty!
>This is one of the more remote flights humanity operates. What even are the diversion points on this route, McMurdo airfield?
The acronym ETOPS is sometimes jokingly expanded to Engines Turn Or Passengers Swim... but, in this case, it is perhaps closer to reality than usual.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ETOPS
In this case the water's probably cold enough nobody would need to swim for long.
> What even are the diversion points...
perhaps Diego Garcia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diego_Garcia
I used to geek out on this, another one from pre-covid was Santiago Chile to Sydney AUS, 2-3x a week. That looked like one _lonely_ flight.
https://www.flightaware.com/live/flight/QFA28
> shrill
I suspect you may have meant to say shill instead.
Why is that anyone else's problem besides SpaceX's? Are they going to pay for it?
Why would Qantas have the implicit right to the airspace first? Space travel and air travel are both value-added human activities. I can't see why we would always prioritize air travel (particularly in very remote locations like this) over space travel.
Most flights will never be impacted this way.
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I can't imagine that much ... nothing out there.
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> Is this [SpaceX flight] for the benefit of humanity?
Yes. Much more so than that one weird flight that's "merely profitable for a single company".
> Do we all get a profit sharing check at some point?
Yes, in the form of more space sector jobs, more jobs and economic benefits that come from more kinds of useful stuff being launched to space more often, and eventually - hopefully - more jobs in space and economic benefits coming from that.
That really downplays the amount of collaboration needed to make a flight like this happen. The airplane was designed and built by tons of people in lots of different counties, building on a century of aviation industry knowledge. The amount of work and experience that goes into making a machine that can safely be 5+ hours from a landing site is enormous.
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This is comically common, but because it has SpaceX in the name, it makes headlines.
> This is comically common, but because it has SpaceX in the name, it makes headlines.
I once had a flight from Puerto Rico to Chicago delayed because of a (SpaceX) launch at Cape Canaveral that happened exactly within the planned launch window. On the plus side, the flight was delayed just barely enough to be “safe” - we got to watch the second stage separation off in the distance just by looking out the window at whatever the 737 cruising altitude is.
I’d guess that space launches just aren’t numerous enough to bother modifying commercial aviation schedules, so they don’t (SpaceX or not). When it looks like a launch is actually going to happen and not get scrubbed, they clear a hole in the sky and then get on with their day.
Space launches have a significant impact on aviation schedules at Orlando and a massive impact on cruise schedules from Canaveral. There has been significant effort towards tightening the size of the keepout windows in both space and time.
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I agree - it is quite funny that it is getting attention. It's like a combination of Elon being on X and getting attention and SEO creating some infinite loop of everything revolving around him. Please stop.
More importantly can someone remind me what warning did the Chinese rockets provide or competitors? Not that that is a standard we should measure against.
Well, some of their chief competitors (i.e. Ariane 5) don't even do a controlled re-entry of their upper stages, so they don't issue warnings at all. They reenter anywhere on the planet at an unannounced random time and place. In a sense SpaceX is a victim of its own success here.
Falcon 9 destroys its upper stages in a controlled manner, in a deliberately chosen re-entry zone (sparsely populated ocean). Ariane 5's cryogenic upper stage can't do this: it's a liquid-hydrogen engine without a relight ability—after it turns off once, you can't reignite it a second time (for a re-entry targeting burn).
Their biggest competitor is China, who likes to drop their boosters on Chinese villages. Understandably, the villagers don't complain about this too loudly.
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SpaceX is also like 99% of all launches, so…
And with that the total number of rocket flights per year has ramped up due to SpaceX. Same thing applies to Starlink satellites "ruining" the night sky. It was a bit of an issue before, but now that there are thousands of satellites up there from one company, they're making headlines for similar reasons.
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More like 50%. In 2024, they had 134 launches and globally, there were 259.
...which result in far less debris making its way down to earth since they commoditised the re-use of launch hardware. Had these launches been performed by ULA or Arianespace or any of the other incumbents there'd be much more debris dropping to the seabed or - in the case of Russian and Chinese launchers - to the desert (Russia) or haphazardly strewn around populated areas (China [1]).
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/26/chinese-rocket-crushes-house...
It's impressive how the modern tactic is to turn everyone into a victim. Even the wealthiest person in the world, who also has power even beyond their wealth - even they use the tactic.
And they've made sure to add "Elon Musk's SpaceX" either for extra SEO, or who-knows-what.
Looks like it worked? Smart strategy
I thought you were kidding.
> Qantas says it has been forced to delay several of its flights to South Africa at the last minute due to warnings of falling debris from Elon Musk’s SpaceX rockets re-entering Earth.
Leading paragraph.
Could you provide evidence of that?
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Amusingly I think it's great that Elon had a very public divorce with Silicon Valley. Otherwise I could easily see this having been titled "Qantas South Africa flights delayed by falling debris from Silicon Valley based SpaceX rocket" for maximum clicks.
The solution here is for Spacex to tighten up their planned reentry corridors. At this point they should have more than enough experience in their ops to narrow down the likely debris field to a narrow strip that can be easily flown around instead of the huge swath of Indian Ocean they'd been allowing for.
It's for the starship test flights. Given the nature of the program, the areas are currently "large":
https://x.com/planet4589/status/1765586241934983320/photo/2
It says they had to delay several flights over a period of a few weeks. Starship isn’t flying anywhere near that often. These are routine Falcon 9 flights and they should be able to have very tight windows in time and space.
My reading is that SpaceX was loose with their windows because it’s easier and they didn’t think it mattered in a remote part of the ocean. Now that there’s an actual reason, they’ll probably tighten it up.
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Don't they typically dispose of falcon 9 second stages over the Indian Ocean? That would be happening much more often than test flights.
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Remember that part of the current testing program includes testing whether or not they can reliably relight their engines on orbit in order to do things like a controlled re-entry. Given the nature of that testing I imagine there's very little room for narrowing their re-entry corridors. If the test succeeds they may re-enter earlier and if it fails they'll re-enter later... or laterally different... either way lighting up the engines for the test probably changes the trajectory of the spacecraft.
The one thing they can do is be sure the original trajectory that gets them to space intersects the Earth within some reason so that if things don't go as planned it doesn't go too far afield.
At best this article is a complaint about communication of whether or not a launch is happening. And even that's hard to really do reasonably: weather, maybe a stuck valve during the countdown, maybe a leisure boat close to the launch site enters the exclusion area... all of those things have happened and prompted changes in launch times and many of those things are outside of SpaceX control.
So seems to me you can lock up the airspace on a "just in case" basis with lots of advanced warning but also reserving lots of time that you won't really need in the end... you know... just in case... , or lock it up much less, but at the cost of relatively short notice to others that might want to use it. Either way you'd still get the article protesting... it's just the complaint would be different.
They will be tightening them as the starship program continues. It's just still in a testing stage right now.
I also want to point out SpaceX still does a better job than some competitors (ahem, ariane, which gets a pass because it's the eurocrat's baby therefore must be good)
The solution here is for them to nail landings. This is a temporary problem during testing. Hopefully there will only be one or two more launches that reenter over the Indian Ocean before they start landing the ship at the launch pad instead.
Their last few rentries have been extremely tight, doing simulated landings on the water right next to a prepositioned camera buoy. The position of the buoy is almost certainly less precise than the rocket itself.
In such cases: would airlines be entitled to compensation from the companies blocking their operations? Or do they just have to deal with it?
Is it typical that anyone gets compensated for a temporary road closure? From what I understand this is one of the safest areas for space debris to re-enter, so likely it's justified and just part of having both spaceflight and aviation industries.
If you block the road with your car, then you can be sued for damages in many jurisdictions.
NOTAMs are all over the place for all sorts of reasons. This is a "deal with it" scenario.
This is only for Starship testing. The issue should go away very soon, after at most a few more Starship tests.
The article doesn't explicitly mention it but this debris will be from spent Falcon 9 upper stages which aren't reusable. The area will continue to be a dumping ground for space junk regardless of Starship, but less of it will be coming from SpaceX.
Sounds like tracking would help. If the re-entry is controlled, why not broadcast transponder info from the reentering parts so they appear on airplane displays? Then they can adjust course, just as they do any other aircraft in their flight path.
The south indian ocean is the re-entry site for the 2nd stage of their next starship flight test, which will (should) re-enter in one piece so the risk of falling debris is certainly not trivial and unfortunately the size of the hazard region is also not trivial.
They've rescheduled a few times now and each time operators flying in this region have to shuffle things around.
They're also going to deploy several fake starlink sats which will re-enter in the same area but with no control AFICT so those will cover more area.
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My point exactly. Airplanes are big too, and there are existing procedures to avoid collision with marked objects in the sky e.g. other planes.
By listening to the transponder messages which give altitude, GPS location, velocity and call sign you can 'see' the stage as it moves through the air like any other vehicle traffic.
Plasmas are going to block the signals for at least some of the phases.
Yes and also, these parts are not made for pristine reentry, it's very likely they'll split up in different parts. How do you make sure every part has a transponder and it doesn't burn up?
Last launch had no blackout period, why would this one?
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> why not broadcast transponder info
Do rockets broadcast ADS-B?
Trad terrestrial ADS-B: https://www.flightaware.com/adsb/
Space-based ADS-B: https://aireon.com/its-just-ads-b/
They do if they install one.
The odds of damage are essentially 0 even if there was no diversion. The background risk of a plane crashing with mechanical failures may dwarf this risk.
It's hard to emphasize how comically vast the region described is. Its like... shooting two marbles across Manhattan and colliding.
How is this debris tracked – NORAD?
No, it's tracked by the Space Surveillance Network (SSN) operated by the U. S. Air Force. They have satellite and ground sensors around the world.
First the night sky, and now this. Fuck SpaceX.
Seek help.
This is only for Starship testing and should go away as an issue after a few more Starship tests.