https://x.com/deankolson87/status/1880026759133032662?t=HdHF...
https://x.com/realcamtem/status/1880026604472266800
https://x.com/adavenport354/status/1880026262254809115
Moment of the breakup:
Edit: Reminds me of "The Eye" from star wars Andor
Let's hope no debris came down on anyone or anything apart from open water.
Staging happens closer to the Texas coast and I don't believe you'd have line of sight to it from the Bahamas.
>Commercial flights are turning around to avoid potential debris.
Also, if a pressurized tank is reentering, that means the FTS failed to detonate.
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...
Or slightly wrong. An FTS is programmed to be conservative. Particularly on unmanned flights. Doubly particularly on reëntry. Triply so on experiments bits.
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.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-01-17/spacex-launch-to-go-a...
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.
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.
Does international space law allow for this?
https://bsky.app/profile/flightradar24.com/post/3lfvhpgmqqc2...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOTAM
It seems like the flights should have been planned around it so no diversion would be needed.
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.
If anything planes much further downrange (thousands of km) should be diverted, not immediately under the re-entry point.
https://jabberwocking.com/did-elon-musk-really-have-to-study...
Only used once, when the Soviets dropped a nuclear reactor on Canada.
> States (countries) bear international responsibility for all space objects that are launched within their territory. This means that regardless of who launches the space object, if it was launched from State A's territory, or from State A's facility, or if State A caused the launch to happen, then State A is fully liable for damages that result from that space object.
Do you have a better explanation why they are doing donuts over the pacific at the time of reentry, then were diverted?
https://www.flightaware.com/live/flight/ABX3133
https://www.flightaware.com/live/flight/N121BZ/history/20250...
They don’t have that level of certainty around what altitude a rocket exploded, or other one off event.
It's beautiful. Looks like something out of a sci-fi movie.
It depends on the Air Force.
Side note: annoying that twitter/X requires login. I'd have sworn Elon said he was removing that requirement to login to view tweets (I think he discussed it with George Hotz).
Found it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkNkSQ42jg4&t=49m30s
Elon:
> This is insane. You shouldn't need a twitter account at all unless you need to write something
George:
> Why did you put the pop up back?
Elon:
> We should not be prohibiting read-only scroll
So there seems to be agreement that twitter shouldn't require an account to read (view) posts. The Twitter Space is from 23 Dec 2022 so perhaps things changed since.
Instagram lets me view the video without login (I have to click the 'X' in the top-right of annoying popup, but I can watch it without logging in).
Why do you think it is pointless?
If I am a pilot and the tower says "debris seen heading east of Bahamas", I probably wont want to keep flying towards that direction.
Yeah, it is probably low risk, but I dont have a super computer or detailed map of the Starship debris field or entry zone.
Apart from obviously double-checking for leaks, we will add fire suppression to that volume and probably increase vent area. Nothing so far suggests pushing next launch past next month.
Lost it over the years but I used to have a photo of about 20 vans of people parked on our property doing the search for debris. Don't think they found any on our land but there was a 3 ft chunk about 5 miles down the road.
"When I'm good... I'm very good. But when I'm bad... I'm even better." :-)
Combined with another tower catch, that's two spectacular shows for the price of one. Hopefully the onboard diagnostic telemetry immediately prior to the RUD is enough to identify the root cause so it can be corrected.
I suppose Trump could advocate that Congress pass a new liability regime more favorable to SpaceX speciically or private launchers generally, though.
As seen from a plane in the air with the break up right in front of it:
https://old.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1i34dki/starship_...
It would just be sent back to ILM marked "Good effort, but too obviously fake. Rework to be more realistic and resubmit."
The RUD was in orbit over 146 kilometers up and >13,000 mph. I'm sure using the FlightAware tracking data someone will work out the actual distance and altitude delta between that plane and the Starship 7 orbital debris. I suspect it was many dozens of miles away and probably still nearly orbital in altitude (~100km).
Spectacular light show though...
There are lots of vertical-landing rockets ... in science fiction, and only before Sputnik in 1957. Once actual space programs came about and lots of engineers understood just how difficult landing a rocket is compared to launching it, they all went away. Fictional vehicles became more and more complex to make them "realistic" (that is, consistent with real spacecraft on the news), or just didn't bother with the details at all and went to quasi-magic technologies like in Star Wars and Star Trek.
SpaceX is taking us to the future by going with something from the past.
Such an unbelievable moment. And I also think an indicator of how much better society could be if we focused more on doing amazing things. The comments on YouTube are just filled with hope optimism and general awesomeness. FWIW that link goes straight to the moneyshot - it's always so much better if you watch it all the way through. It's an amazing broadcast.
Not necessarily. Steam is obliged to give way to sail, even when the sailing ship is much smaller.
Nonetheless, recently NASA won the lottery when part of some batteries they jettisoned from the ISS ended up crashing through a house in Florida. [1] Oddly enough there are treaties on this, but only from an international perspective - landing on your own country was not covered! But I'm certain NASA will obviously make it right, as would SpaceX. If they didn't, then surely the family could easily sue as well.
[1] - https://www.space.com/space-debris-florida-family-nasa-lawsu...
With the Apollo moon landings in recent memory, I'd read those sci-fi books late at night with a flashlight under the covers of my bed and then fall asleep thinking about how "I'll still be alive 50 years from now. I'll get to actually live in the world of the future. Maybe I'll even work in space." And by the time I graduated from high school it was already becoming clear things were going much to slow for me to even see humans colonizing Mars. And that was reality until about a decade ago.
So, yeah. Watching the live video of the first successful Starship orbital launch with my teenage daughter... I got a little choked up, which surprised me. Felt like discovering a very old dream that's been buried too long. And somehow the damn thing's still alive. Or maybe I just got something in my eye. Anyway, I know it's too late for me to ever work off-planet. But maybe not for my kid... so, the dream lives on. It just had to skip a generation.
https://www.whoi.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Abbreviated-...
In my experience in corporate america you communicate efficiency by proclaiming a checklist of things to do - plausible, but not necessarily accurate things - and then let engineers figure it out.
Nobody cares of the original checklist as long as the problem gets resolved. It's weird but it seems very hard to utter statement "I don't have specific answers but we have very capable engineers, I'm sure they will figure it out". It's always better to say (from the top of your head) "To resolve A, we will do X,Y and Z!". Then when A get's resolved, everyone praises the effort. Then when they query what actually was done it's "well we found out in fact what were amiss were I, J K".
At those speeds, temps and pressures exploding into tiny pieces isn't just easy - it's the default. NOT exploding is much harder!
According to this website their current success rate is 99,18%. That's a good number I guess? Considering other companies did not even land their stages for years.
https://spaceinsider.tech/2024/07/31/ula-vs-spacex/#:~:text=....
https://drs.faa.gov/browse/excelExternalWindow/DRSDOCID17389...
Starship's flight paths are carefully calculated by SpaceX and the FAA to achieve this exact outcome. In the event of a RUD near orbit, little to no debris will survive reentry. Any that does survive won't reach the surface (or aircraft in flight) until it is far out into the Atlantic Ocean away from land, people, flight paths and shipping lanes. For Starship launches the FAA temporarily closes a large amount of space in the Gulf of Mexico to air and ship traffic because that's where Starship is low and slow enough for debris to be a threat to aircraft. These planes were flying in the Caribbean, where there was no FAA NOTAM closing their airspace because by the time Starship is over the Caribbean, it's in orbit. If there's a RUD over the Caribbean it's already too high and going too fast for debris to be a threat to aircraft or people anywhere near the Carribean. The only "threat" in the Caribbean today was from anyone being distracted by the pretty light show in orbit far above them (that looked deceptively close from some angles).
(Not wishing to ask the obvious, and depending on the size of the pieces) debris at 100km altitude pretty much always ends up being debris falling through 10km ... right?
There's an order of magnitude difference between them. If they were cars, it'd be like comparing the smallest car you can think of vs one of the biggest tanks ever made.
In that scenario, debris from 100km will survive to pass through 10km. The point is: if the mass becomes debris >143km high traveling at >13,000 mph over the Caribbean - it doesn't pass through 10km anywhere near the Caribbean. Even though the friction causing tempered metal to glow white hot is slowing it, the trajectory is ballistic so by the time it slows enough to get that low (10km) it's hundreds or thousands of miles East from where the explosion happened (and where that airplane was).
It's weird because given these orbital velocities and altitudes, our intuitions about up and down aren't very useful. Starship exploded in orbit over the Caribbean, so planes in the Caribbean were safe from falling debris. If it was Mir instead of Starship, planes hundreds or thousands miles to the East of the Caribbean would be at elevated risk. My high school astronomy teacher once said something like "Rockets don't go up to reach orbit. They go sideways. And they keep going sideways faster and faster until they're going so fast, up and down don't matter anymore." While that's hardly a scientific summary, it does give a sense of the dynamics. You'll recall that Mir was intentionally de-orbited so it would land in a desolate part of the Indian Ocean. So, did they blow it up right over the Indian Ocean? Nope. To crash it in the Indian Ocean, given the altitude and speed, they "blew it up" on the other side of Earth, like maybe over Chicago (I actually don't recall where the de-orbit began, but had to be very far away).
> The locals here are pissed in Turks and Cacos. Huge dabris rained down everywhere
It's from the pilot at the reddit link above.
https://old.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1i34dki/starship_...
Appreciate that, the question would be, do we know that there won't be any aircraft at the right (wrong) altitude in that area(?!)
With aircraft regularly travelling thousands of miles, would be interesting to know whether route choices are made to avoid being "under"* the track of a rocket's launch?
There's apparently another video of the debris, this one appears to show very clearly that the debris is "going sideways"* rather than coming vertically down https://x.com/kristinafitzsi/status/1880032746032230515?s=61
* apologies for the poor phrasing :)
My tests keep failing until I fix all of my code, then we deploy to production. If code fails in production than that's a problem.
We could say that rockets are not code. A test run of a Spaceship surely cost much more than a test run of any software on my laptop but tests are still tests. They are very likely to fail and there are things to learn from their failures.
SpaceX brought our childhood dreams back. But more importantly, SpaceX is bringing our naive childhood expectations to fruitation.
The Falcon 9 puts humans into orbit then turns around and lands not far from the launch tower. It's then brought in for maintenance and a few weeks later launching again - some of them have done 20 flights.
And if the Starship is not under power yet falling and using the flaperons for control, is that considered "under sail" for purposes of right of way?
They know there's little to no risk to aircraft or people hundreds or thousands of miles to the East of a Starship RUD in orbit because they know exactly what's inside Starship and how it's built. They model how it will break up when traveling at these insane speeds and how the metal masses will melt and burn up during re-entry. They actually test this stuff in blast furnaces. It's a statistical model so it's theoretically possible a few small bits could make it to the ground on rare occasion, so we can't say debris will never happen - but there's been a lot of history and testing and the experts are confident it's extremely safe.
The case of the MIR space station was very different than a Starship. MIR was built a long time ago by the Soviet Union and they used a big, heavily shielded power plant. That lead shielding was really the part that had a significant risk of not burning up fully on re-entry. Starship, Starlink satellites and other modern spacecraft are now usually designed to burn up on reentry. However, there are still some things in orbit and things we'll need to put in orbit in the future that won't entirely burn up on reentry. There will always be a very small risk of an accidental uncontrolled reentry causing a threat. However, these risks are vanishingly small both because we design these spacecraft with redundant systems and fail-safes and because Earth is mostly uninhabited oceans, much of our landmasses are unpopulated or sparely populated, even in the unlikely event one of the few spacecraft with a large mass that won't entirely burn up has failed and is de-orbiting out of control, we can still blow it up - and timing that at the right moment will still put it down in a safe place (like it did with MIR). There's no such thing as absolute 100% perfect safety. But you're far, far more likely to die from a great white shark attack than be injured by satellite debris.
More to the point, a huge number of meteorites hit Earth every year and it's estimated over 17,000 survive to hit the surface. There are a bunch listed right now on eBay. Do you know anyone injured by any of the 17,000 space rocks that crashed into our planet this year or any airliners hit by one?
The space-shuttle could not fly to the orbit automatically. It had to have people on board, and the first flight, IIRC, came close to a disaster.
However if you see the stream you can see one of the tanks rapidly emptied before loss of signal
It seems this was not survivable regardless of fire or not
How would you test a rocket?
Both sailing and power driven vessels need to give ways to (among other things) “vessel restricted in her ability to maneuver”. And an aircraft carrier launching or recovering aircraft is considered to be restricted in her ability to maneuver (quite rightfully so, it is hard enough to land on them without the ship swerving left and right).
So that means that a mighty aircraft carrier needs to (at least according to the regulations) dodge tiny sailing ships, but once they start launching or recovering aircraft it is the responsibility of the sailing ship to avoid them.
Source: Rule 18 of the ColRegs (The International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea 1972)
Americans: Please divert your course 15 degrees to the North to avoid a collision.
Canadians: Recommend you divert YOUR course 15 degrees to the South to avoid a collision.
Americans: This is the Captain of a US Navy ship. I say again, divert YOUR course.
Canadians: No. I say again, you divert YOUR course.
Americans: This is the aircraft carrier USS Lincoln, the second largest ship in the United States' Atlantic fleet. We are accompanied by three destroyers, three cruisers and numerous support vessels. I demand that YOU change your course 15 degrees north, that's one five degrees north, or countermeasures will be undertaken to ensure the safety of this ship.
Canadians: This is a lighthouse. Your call
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lighthouse_and_naval_vessel_ur...
But for real, i think the simple answer is that debris falling from space is outside of the scope of the ColRegs. Simply speaking they come too fast so you can’t maneuver your vessel out of their way, and unless you are a warship you don’t have the tools to even know where exactly they will hit. If you try to run you might even put yourself in their path. After all from the most unlucky position they would be just bright stationary spots on the sky getting ever so slightly bigger. Until they start to get bigger faster and faster. (Constant bearing and decreasing range being the hallmarks of an impending colision.)
Honestly I thought they would be live testing fuel exchange in orbit by now. Seems pretty far from it sadly.
You’ll catch issues along the way, but you can’t catch all of them before a full launch test. That’s why there are launch tests.
What makes these launches “non-production” tests is that they are not carrying any valuable payload. Blowing up rockets like this is exactly what gives the company it’s advantage over competitors who try to anticipate everything during design stages.
19 people have died in the 391 crewed space missions humans have done so far. The risk of dying is very high. Starship is unlikely to change that, although the commoditization of space flight could have reduce the risk simply by making problems easier to spot because there's more flights.
It would be extremely unlikely due to the laws of physics, last time I checked they were still in effect.
> we had an oxygen/fuel leak
If that's correct, then you can't just remove air. The only option would be to cool things down so it stops burning.
I'd say that only the 7th mission was legitimately a failure, because there was some rerouting of flights outside the exclusion zone. The other six missions were successful tests since nothing other than the rocket itself was affected.
I’m curious because I was on a flight to Puerto Rico from Florida at 3pm ET they diverted our flight. They didn’t really give us many details but said the “landing strips were closed”. Our friends on a slightly early flight diverted to ST Thomas. We were going to divert to a nearby airport in Puerto Rico (we were going to land in Aguadilla instead of San Juan) so I feel like these diversions wouldn’t be related but the timing seems pretty odd.
map: https://github.com/kla-s/Space/blob/main/Map_NOTMAR_NOTAM_Sp... description: https://github.com/kla-s/Space/tree/main
Lets hope this is the year of Linux desktop and i didn't violate any licenses or made big errors ;)
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.
It's true that other rocket companies are treating launches as production, but SpaceX has always been doing "hardware-rich" testing.
They already implemented a whole host of changes to the vehicles after the first test back in 2023. There's a list of corrective actions here.
If my understanding is correct, it seems sensible at least in a hand-wavy way: you have a few places where things are more likely to come down either unplanned or planned (immediately around the launch site and at the planned deorbit area), but then you have a wide swath of the world where, in a relatively localized area, you -might- have something come down with some warning that it will (just because the time it takes to get from altitude to where aircraft are). You close the priority areas, but you don't close the less likely areas pro-actively, but only do so reactively, it seems you'd achieve a balance between aircraft safety and air service disruptions.
But that still means it’s not just taxpayer money, it’s mostly theirs. They’ve been raising equity rounds this whole time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6hIXB62bUE
It's ATC audio captured during the event.
SpaceX also has a simplification streak: the Raptor engines being the canonical example. Lower complexity generally means less unexpected failure modes.
Early aviation was extremely dangerous. Now a plane is among the safest places to be.
Without Spacex, the typical cohort of gov contractors would have been happy bleeding NASA dry with one time use rockets that have 10x the launch cost and carry 1/4 the cargo.
As far as I understand airline pilots have a high level of authority and diverting probably was the right call depending on the lag between seeing it and knowing what it was or if there was a risk of debris reaching them. They wouldn't necessarily know how high it got or what that means for debris.
Not necessarily. Your engine which used to have 200 sensors perhaps now only has 8. But you now don't know when temperatures were close to melting point in a specific part of the engine. When something goes wrong, you are less likely to identify the precise cause because you have less data.
Many of those sensors are not to enable the rocket to fly at all, but merely for later data analysis to know if anything was close to failure.
In yesterdays launch, if the engines had more sensors musk probably wouldn't have said "an oxygen/fuel leak", but would have been able to say "Engine #7 had an oxygen leak at the inlet pipe, as shown by the loud whistling noise detected by engine #7's microphone array"
I truly wish more software engineers thought this way. I see a lot of mentality in software where people are even impressed by complexity, like "wow what a complex system!" like it's a good thing. It's not. It's a sign that no effort has been put into understanding the problem domain conceptually, or that no discipline has been followed around reducing the number of systems or restraint over adding new ones.
I've seen incredibly good software engineers join teams and have net negative lines of code contributed for some time.
If we ever encountered, say, an alien race millions of years ahead of us on this kind of technology curve, I think one of the things that would strike us would be the simplicity of their technology. It would be like everything is a direct response and fit to the laws of physics with nothing extraneous. Their software -- assuming they still use computers as we understand them -- would be functional bliss that directly represented the problem domain, with every state a pure function of previous state.
We might get to this kind of software eventually. This is still a young field. Simplicity, being harder than complexity, often takes time and iteration to achieve. Often there's a complexity bloat followed by a shake out, then repeat, over many cycles.
Integration tests are the next where multiple units are combined.
Then there is staging.
That would be like comparing a 1-y.o.'s ability to run to a 10-y.o.'s. Of course the younger kid doesn't yet control their legs, but that doesn't mean it's going to stumble and fall forever.
https://www.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1i34dki/starship_...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuttle-Centaur
- "The astronauts considered the Shuttle-Centaur missions to be riskiest Space Shuttle missions yet,[85] referring to Centaur as the "Death Star".[86]"
It would have been impossible for the pilot to know if that debris was shortly in front of them and at co-altitude or extremely far in front of them and at a significantly higher altitude.
In this case it was almost certainly the latter. But the uncertainty alone was enough to warrant diverting.
> Stupid comment.
Aim higher on HN.
I love that this is also a model of reality. Everything is made of differential equations.
Don't the heat tiles at least make it through? And possibly large hunks of metal like the thrust frame and engines.
Real tests do all of this at once with no option to escape reality.
Again, one thing is automating thorough software tests, another one is testing physical stuff.
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.
This is meant to be a human rated ship of course, how will you reduce this danger? I know this stuff is hard, but you can't just iterate and say starship 57 has had 3 flights without leaks, we got it now. Since I have no expertise here, I can imagine all kinds of unlikely workarounds like holding the gas under lower pressure with humans on board or something to reduce the risk.
Also water would make it hotter, given this is liquid oxygen.
I think it's an absolutely reasonable choice to just say comfortably divert rather than try to linger in hopes of it not lasting too long and possibly ending up diverting anyway... but on minimums.
Next engine revision (Raptor 3) should help, as it is much simplified and quite less likely to leak or get damaged during flight.
We know nothing, but the test having good data on what went wrong is a great starting point.
This can work. Fundamental structural components of airliners just can’t fail without killing everyone, and high reliability is achieved with careful design, manufacturing, testing, and inspection. I’m not sure if a gigantic non-leaky tank is harder to pull off that way, but they might have to regardless.
We’re going to have to accept that space travel is going to be inherently dangerous for the foreseeable future. Starship is in a good position to improve this, because it should fly frequently (more opportunities to discover and fix problems) and the non-manned variant is very similar to the manned variant (you can discover many problems without killing people). But there are inherent limitations. There’s just not as much capacity for redundancy. The engines have to be clustered so fratricide or common failure modes are going to me more likely. Losing all the engines is guaranteed death on Starship, versus a good chance to survive in an airliner.
All other practical considerations aside, I think this alone sinks any possibility of using Starship for Earth-to-Earth travel as has been proposed by SpaceX.
(b) is true and should make it substantially safer than other launch systems. But given how narrow the margins are for something going wrong (zero ability to land safely with all engines dead, for example) it’s still going to be pretty dangerous compared to more mundane forms of travel.
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.
But yea, seems appropriate to update it or if that is going to be the process, write it in stone.
It is more like an "all or nothing" process.
> Stupid comment
got me. There's literally an HN rule about this: [0]
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
I feel like the world would be a better place if people would tone down the ad-hominem in their day-to-day discourse just a little bit.
I dove deep enough to a get sense that these questions have been extremely well-studied and not just by 2020s FAA and SpaceX but going back to the Shuttle and Apollo eras. The body of peer-reviewed engineering studies seemed exhaustive - and not just NASA-centric, the Europeans and Soviets did their own studies too.
Your question is reasonable and occurred to me as well. Components engineered to withstand the enormous heat and pressure of orbital re-entry should be more likely to survive a RUD scenario and subsequent re-entry burn for longer. From what I recall reading, this fits into a safety profile required to ensure very, very low risk because even if a tiny percentage of mass occasionally survives to reach the surface, the actual risk that surviving mass presents is a combination of its quantity, mass, piece size, velocity and, most importantly, where any final surviving bits reach the surface.
I recall seeing a diagram dividing the Boca orbital launch trajectory into windows, like: right around the launch pad, out over the gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean, Atlantic, Africa, Indian ocean, and so on. The entire path until it's out over empty Atlantic ocean has minimal land, people and stuff under it. The gulf of Mexico is by far the highest risk because the rocket is still relatively low and slow. A RUD there could potentially be a lot of stuff coming down. There's not a lot out there in the gulf, just a few ships and planes but the FAA closes a huge area because, while the statistical risk is very low in an absolute sense, it's still too high to take chances.
For later windows, they don't close the corridor underneath to plane and ship traffic because the rocket's much greater speed and altitude later in the flight allows more precisely modeling where the debris field will come down. There was another diagram showing a statistical model of a debris field impact zone as an elongated oval with color-coded concentric rings dividing the debris mass into classes. The outermost ring is the debris that breaks up into smaller, lighter pieces. It's the widest and longest but it's the stuff that's much lower risk because it's smaller and slower.
The smallest concentric ring in the middle is where the small amount of heavier pieces most likely to survive will come down, if any do survive. As you'd expect, that innermost ring is shifted toward the far end of the oval and is a much smaller area. The headline I took away was that there's a very small amount of higher mass debris that both A) is less likely to break up into tiny, lower mass pieces, and B) is less likely to completely burn up. This is the higher-risk mass and, due to its mass, it tends to stay on trajectory, go fastest, farthest and not spread out much. In short, the statistical model showed a very high probability of any higher risk stuff which survives coming down in a surprisingly tiny area. The overall safety model is based on a combination of factors working together so it meets the safety requirements in each window of the flight for each class of mass. The carefully chosen launch location, spacecraft design, component materials, flight path and a bunch of other factors all work together to put the small amount of higher risk stuff down somewhere that fits the safety profile of very, very low risk to people and property. Disclaimer: I've probably got some details wrong and left some things out but this is the sense I got from what I learned. I came away feeling that the safety work done on space launches is comprehensive, diligent and based on a long history of robust, peer-reviewed science backed up by detailed engineering tests as well as real-world data from decades of launches, RUDs and de-orbits.
A fun side story: a few months ago I was at the Hacker's Conference and Scott Manley ("Everyday Astronaut" on YouTube) was attending as he often does. He brought along some interesting space artifacts just to set out on a table for casual show and tell. I was able to pick up and examine a Starship heat tile that was fished out of the gulf of Mexico. It was surprisingly light weight. Sort of like a thick wall piece from a styrofoam picnic cooler. It had a very thin hard shell on one side. This shell was clearly very brittle as it had already been broken up and I was holding an index card-sized shattered piece that weighed maybe a couple ounces. This was clearly not something that was going to maintain structural integrity post-RUD. Once it wasn't packed tightly together into a smooth aerodynamic surface, it's gonna shred into tiny pieces. And that seemed by design - which apparently worked as intended because even without a RUD, at the low and slow speeds over the gulf and near the launch pad it did shatter into small, light pieces - assisted only by the rocket tipping over into the water followed by the relatively mild explosion of the remaining propellant (mild compared to an unimaginably violent orbital RUD, that is). Holding it I remembered the debris field oval diagram and thought, "this is smaller, slower, safer stuff in the outer zones."
Falcon 9 has had plenty of "ROI" but it wasn't really federally funded. Let's not get carried away though about "more than the entire US space industry combined," though.
How does Halon works?
https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/1i3na4a/...
For example, if system A has a failure probability of 10%, if A is redundant with another A', the combined failure probability is 1%.
That of course presumes that A and A' are not connected.
And you can have fires where both fuel and oxidiser are solid: thermite reactions.
"Fire point" seems to be more of a factor for conventional fire concerns, albeit I'm judging a phrase I've not heard before by a stub-sized Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_point
The response to this was to make sure repairs are carried out correctly so the structure doesn’t fail, not to somehow make two redundant bulkheads or two skins.
So even if those claims are true, just finding a little debris doesn't invalidate the safety model or indicate there was ever unacceptable risk. The real question is if any debris from a higher risk class fell in a place the safety model didn't predict and why. That would certainly be notable and worth incorporating into future safety models.
In the absence of solid confirmation, I'm going to stick with the model and the basic physics. If the debris is just the expected stuff, I'm sure SpaceX regrets littering the beaches and should definitely pay for some crews to pick that stuff up and trash it.
A future starship could plausibly be the first rocket to fly to space unmanned, return, and then fly humans to space!
The idea is to design the airplane to survive an explosive decompression failure, not pretend that explosive decompression doesn't happen. For example, on the DC-10, the floor collapsed from explosive decompression, jamming the control cables and causing a horrendous crash.
The fix was not preventing explosive decompression. The fix (on the 757) was to locate the redundant set of control cables along the ceiling. Also, blowout panels were put in the floor so the floor wouldn't collapse.
It's not always practical to fix an older design like the 747. When it isn't practical, a stepped-up inspection protocol is added.
P.S. The 747 was designed to survive a decompression. The oversight was nobody realized that a failure of the rear bulkhead could destroy the tail section. Things like that happen in complex systems, and an airliner is incredibly complicated.
P.P.S. When I was a newbie at Boeing, I asked about the wing spar, too. That's how I know it is dual!
