Comment by vikingerik
3 days ago
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.
Because small differences early in the trajectory result in large differences later on. Think of driving a trailer backwards and imagine you weren't allowed to do corrections after a certain point.
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Most likely they don’t, but safety margins for experimental rockets need to be large.
I’m a bit surprised the Southern Indian Ocean wasn’t prioritized. That is even more remote.
The flight was over the Southern Indian Ocean?
https://www.flightaware.com/live/flight/QFA63/history/202501...
Duh, sorry. Got confused.