Starship Flight 7

>Commercial flights are turning around to avoid potential debris.

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...

Sometimes this is counterproductive to the goal of HN.

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.

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.

They don’t have that level of certainty around what altitude a rocket exploded, or other one off event.

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.

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.

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.