Starship Flight 7

What a strangely beautiful sight. While I was excited to see ship land, I'm also happy I get to see videos of this!

As long as the debris has no effect wherever it lands, I agree with you

A lot of flights seem to be diverting to avoid it...

https://bsky.app/profile/flightradar24.com/post/3lfvhpgmqqc2...

Understandable, but an over reaction. Any debris not burning up is falling down after minutes.

Does SpaceX bother with NOTAM for its launches?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOTAM

It seems like the flights should have been planned around it so no diversion would be needed.

Would you bet hundreds of lives and millions of dollars on that?

Yes. Space debris near orbiting speeds doesn't fall straight down, it's simple physics.

If anything planes much further downrange (thousands of km) should be diverted, not immediately under the re-entry point.

I felt.. bad watching that breakup, it reminded me of Columbia.

It wasn’t at orbital speeds yet.

They do but its not clear to me whether the area where it broke up was actually included in the original NOTAM. The NOTMAR definitely does not according to the graphic shown on the NASASpaceflight stream. They are still live so I can't link a time code but something like -4:56 in this stream as of posting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nM3vGdanpw

Over 21000km/h when it broke up, compared to ~28k for stuff orbiting in LEO. Should still go quite far.

The planes diverting were downrange. Also, I doubt they had much information to go off, and were essentially flying blind about where the debris were unless they had a direct line to NORAD.

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...

https://www.flightaware.com/live/flight/NKS172

I don’t know why you’re getting downvoted, but I thought this too.

Yes, although drag is gonna be… substantially higher like this as well.

Looks like something out of a sci-fi movie.

> donuts over the pacific

Atlantic

I don't have. Maybe they were indeed diverted because people got scared? Still seems pointless given the distances involved. Most reports are coming from social media / people watching flightradar24, and news media is just picking those up.

Doh!

Which coincidentally launched 22 years ago today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-107

There are several, all at the same time, all in the same area, where the debreis was seen.

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.

I remember being woken up by the thunder from Columbia.

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.

Yes, both spectacular and beautiful. I guess Starship can now say what the legendary comedy actress (and sex symbol) of early cinema Mae West said:

"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.

More as long as there were no humans onboard

Nuts!

I remember waiting for the sonic boom, that never came…

The number of SpaceX video clips that I know are "actual things really happening" which still activate the involuntary "Sci-Fi / CGI effect" neurons in my brain is remarkable.

I was on r/flightradar24 and someone was listening on ATC and heard that one of the flights declared emergency due to fuel.

Other planes were also caught up in the chaos but SJU was at capacity apparently

Yeah. I know that feeling.

That tower catch. That _had_ to be a new version of Kerbal, right? The physics looked good, but there's no way that was real...

Meta-commentary is annoying (yes, I realize the irony.)

Indeed. The one that still flips a bit in my brain is the two Falcon rockets landing in unison side by side. I'd say it was high-end CGI except no director would approve an effects shot of orbital rockets landing in such a perfect, cinematically choreographed way.

It would just be sent back to ILM marked "Good effort, but too obviously fake. Rework to be more realistic and resubmit."

>What a strangely beautiful sight.

"My god, Bones, what have I done?"

Seeing a rocket land vertically goes against almost 70 years of what we "know" about rockets. Falcon 9 rockets landing on legs seem unnatural enough; now we have a rocket, the size of a 20-story building, landing on chopsticks.

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.

Just to link that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbSwFU6tY1c&t=1793s

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.

When I was in elementary school back in the 1970s, I read every sci-fi book in the tiny school library. They were all old, even then. Early stuff by Asimov, Heinlein and Bova. Paperbacks on cheap pulp with cover paintings of rockets sitting upright on alien terrain. Tiny people in space suits climbing down ladders to explore a new world.

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.

Not to rain too much on your harping, but the DC-X program did vertical landing 30 years ago.

Excitement guaranteed

Thank you for this beautiful comment. I could have written it word for word. I still watch every Starship launch with my kids, and CRS-7 was the first Falcon launch that we missed watching live. At that time we were waiting months between launches. And I'm currently petting a dog named Asimov while writing this.

SpaceX brought our childhood dreams back. But more importantly, SpaceX is bringing our naive childhood expectations to fruitation.

Yes, and that was all the experimental program did. No humans on board, no payloads, no orbit, not even suborbital as they stayed close to the ground.

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.

OTOH I remembered Columbia too and I felt good knowing that Starship is being tested thoroughly without jeopardizing the crew.

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.

Does melting down not reshape metallic particles into ideal droplett parts ?

No.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/02/world/africa/kenya-space-...

It’s a pretty expensive way to make fireworks.

Nice, what happened of it?

SpaceX landing and catching boosters is amazing, but landing rockets is not new: all the Apollo LMs, indeed everything ever landed on the Moon was done with "vertical-landing" rockets.

Since i couldn't find the time code in the video, i put a map together with both NOTAM and NOTMAR.

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 ;)

My understanding is that there are areas which are noted as being possible debris zones across the flight path, but that aircraft are not specifically told to avoid those areas unless there an actual event to which to respond.

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.

Actually, this video is a good indication for exactly what transpired:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6hIXB62bUE

It's ATC audio captured during the event.

This video, the map elsewhere in this subthread, and the stream recording give a nicely detailed view into what went down. It seems like everything went like it was supposed to in terms of pre-warning, but based on the video the information didn't make it to pilots with coinciding flight plans until after the fact.

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.

It happened at about the time budgetary winter happened for the us space budget, so there was no follow-up on the demonstrator.

You’re comparing an experimental program that lasted 6 years with a company founded 22 years ago. How many payload flights did space-x do 6 years into its existence?

Yeah... and ATC for a good while didn't have any estimate for time to resolution. So, do you run the airplane's fuel down to a minimal reserve level in hopes that the restrictions might lift... or just call it done and divert?

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.

No, you made that comparison two posts up. I just replied to you ))

The ATC is up on YouTube - I heard it on the vatsim channel. ATC would not let pilots transit the designated danger airspace without declaring an emergency. So they did.