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Comment by mh-

1 day ago

https://x.com/DJSnM/status/1880032865209184354

>Commercial flights are turning around to avoid potential debris.

27 comments

mh-

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ricardobeat  1 day ago

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  1 day ago

    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  1 day ago

    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.

    • dmurray  1 day ago

      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.

      5 replies →

  • jjk166  11 hours ago

    > 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.

  • mh-  1 day ago

    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  1 day ago

    Yeah, most likely an understandable overreacting givent the fireworks. But better safe than sorry in this case. :-)