Island residents are still dealing with the fallout of exploded Starship
cnn.comSomehow the author of the article discussed how liquid methane and liquid oxygen would be dangerous to touch.... Without mentioning that it would absolutely not be present
What's worse, is that the quote comes from a US government employee?
I assume quotes are taken out of context by the article author. But that last quote appears pretty idiotic. I would hope that an executive director had more nous (technical and PR).The megarocket instead relies on liquid methane and oxygen for propellant — but “any kind of fuel is going to … have a bunch of chemical energy inside it,” according to Marlon Sorge, the executive director of the Center for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies at The Aerospace Corporation, a federally funded research center. “Even if it isn’t as dangerous as hydrazine, where you touch it or get close to it and you’re in trouble — it’s still volatile, like gasoline,” Sorge added. “And there are other things on board spacecraft, like batteries.” He added that it is possible for entire rocket fuel tanks to survive the trip down to the ground: “If they’re weakened, you touch them, they blow up.”That last quote is saying that if tank hits the ground but it's not compromised enough for pressure to escape, disturbing it could cause it to release all that pressurized fuel at once ("explode"). Hopefully in the original context they explained that this is not very likely.
I think composite-overwrapped pressure vessels could survive intact, though those are technically not fuel, but inert pressurant gasses. I believe Starship uses both helium and CO2.
One of the Falcon ones reentered as space debris in Washington state, in 2021,
https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/2/22364582/spacex-rocket-deb... ("SpaceX rocket debris lands on man’s farm in Washington")
edit: There's a few other examples on page 47 of
(.pdf) https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/Report_to_Congress_R... ("Risk Associated with Reentry Disposal of Satellites from Proposed Large Constellations in Low Earth Orbit" (2021))
edit²: Here's what the Starship COPV's look like (being recovered from the Indian ocean),
https://old.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/1h1l1gk/starship_s3...
Ya, there are real risks, COPVs, burning batteries, and the flight termination system explosives.
The steel on the fuel tanks of Starship is only four millimeters thick. The chance of it surviving are basically non-existent.
I imagine the journalist was just fishing for expert quotes that fit their predetermined narrative and leaving everything the expert said about the unlikelihood out.
> The agency also said that, before the test flight launched, it required SpaceX to map out “hazard areas sufficient to ensure that the probability of casualty to a member of the public on land or on board a maritime vessel does not exceed one in one million.”
The way this is worded makes it sound like it could be a one in a million chance separately for every individual. So for example if the chance is exactly one in a million per person, then the probability of someone in a town of 1000 people dying would be one in a thousand, and the statistical expectation of having a city of 1M people in the “Debris Response Area” is that one person would die.
I hope my reading is wrong. Can someone correct me - is the rule that the total probability of any 1 person in total dying is 1:1000000 or less, or is it really per-person? For context about why 1:1000000 per person is pretty bad, that’s almost as risky as skydiving (1:370000 per jump) and much riskier than driving in a car.
I feel like I’m okay with “rapid iterative development” when the company assumes any and all risks, and takes responsibility for any & all failures. It seems to be crossing a line if the risks are externalized to the public & national agencies, especially when the risks aren’t fully communicated or when veto choice is not given to everyone involved, right?
It’s common in this type of statement for “A member of the public” to refer to any person rather than just one person.
Your reading is wrong.
Good! How do you know? That’s the part I was hoping to hear. The public statements are downplaying the risks.
CNNs new paywall essentially locks up Firefox on iOS.
Once their paywall pops up, I cannot do anything with the app except swipe left to go back. The Firefox menu is inaccessible as are any other features of the browser.
This is the most hostile UI I have seen in years; and I will quickly learn to never click any CNN link.
I would also blame Firefox (or underlying Safari) for this. The browser shouldn't cede control to the page, even things like modifying the right-click menu are iffy and should be easy to override.
It's incredibly hard to decide what is a reasonable event to handle and what is "ceding control to the page".
Even more because for most of those events, handling just a handful of them is perfectly fine and will improve your experience in a web app. Sometimes even conditionally handling them all is still perfectly fine.
Maybe I don't want my experience "improved". I have never been glad my scrollbar was hijacked, or that the behaviors of the "back" button was changed.
> I have never been glad my scrollbar was hijacked
Well, maybe not you, but almost everybody praises scroll to zoom in map applications.
> almost everybody praises scroll to zoom in map applications
In what sense is that true?
On desktop shift+rightclick overrides context menu event handlers.
Tangent: In win10 when you right-click the menu is massive, it's the full height of the window not sure if that was a bug
Edit: menu as in "open link in new tab"
You can replace the `www.` in the URL with `lite.` to get the text-only version[0] which has no ads, no paywall, and no images.
Not sure if it will continue to work for the paywalled articles, but it’s a much more pleasant reading experience if you do find a CNN article you want to read.
[0]: https://lite.cnn.com/2025/01/30/science/spacex-starship-expl...
Page works perfectly fine with Firefox on Android, with ublock origin, which also seems to strip out the paywall
Related: a long podcast talking about the issues with starship locally: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/32-spacex-wastewater-l... (from https://deceleration.news/podcast/ ) , also https://deceleration.news/spacex-is-colonizing-south-texas-e...
So many words to say: spaceX clean up your sh*t. It's fair ask. But it's also spreading "concerns" with little justification to do reputational damage to a public figure.
> “I just never have seen colors like that in the sky,” said Lori Kaine, a resident of Providenciales, the main island of the Turks and Caicos archipelago. “At first, I thought it was an actual plane that had exploded.”
Starship broke up in beautiful rainbow.
Souvenirs- get your piece of starship now
Seriously. I met a guy on Hwy 4 in front of the Starship launch pad that was selling found bits out of his truck. He was asking a couple thousand dollars for a whole TPS tile. I'd buy a tile to help pay for the cleanup.
No mention of visitors from foreign adversaries doing a bit of beach combing?
I imagine SpaceX will clean the debris as much as possible. No pun intended.
Since when is CNN paywalled?!?
Since when is CNN paywalled?!?
Recently. There's been a few articles in the newspaper lately about CNN having a new guy in charge.
From memory: he wants to follow the New York Times/Washington Post model of news delivery -- which as much as people on HN hate -- seems to be working, financially speaking.
To that end, he's putting CNN news behind a paywall, firing 200 TV journalists, and hiring 200 digital people.
He's also pushing for more of CNN's video to be shot vertically.
This is hilarious. I can't think of a dumber move.
This is hilariously common, but because SpaceX is involved, the media spotlight is centered on it.
(No other opinions implied or denied btw, just my observation)
> This is hilariously common
Falling debris from space is common, it seems (NASA says "1 piece per day" on average), but they tend to burn up upon re-entry. Falling debris causing any sort of damage seems to be relatively uncommon, unless I've gotten a lot worse at searching for information.
What numbers are you looking at that makes it seem like it's "hilariously common"?
Notably, zero injuries and only one (unconfirmed) report of minor damage to a car.
Definitely a case to be made for littering though.
I assume the GP is talking about the fact that almost every rocket, except SpaceX' Falcon 9 and the Space Shuttle, is designed to be dumped in the ocean. Specifically the first stage of a rocket usually falls down into the ocean at a relatively high speed (probably in pieces), but it's speed is usually not high enough to burn up. The second stage of a rocket goes all the way to orbit with the payload, achieving speeds like 7 km per second, and then reenters the atmosphere and burns, but some pieces can still come down intact, so it's preferably also over the ocean. The second stage may also stay in space indefinitely, depending on the target orbit of the payload. Anyway, dumping space stuff in the oceans is the default since forever.
SpaceX' Falcon 9 is an exception, because its first stage is designed to land on the barge in the ocean or fly back to the coast and land on the landing pad, allowing it to be reused. Falcon 9's second stage still burns up/breaks down in the atmosphere after launch, in a controlled way (over the ocean). The goal of Starship is to have the first ever wholly reusable rocket, of which no part will be dumped in the oceans.
In the case of the last flight of Starship, it obviously wasn't meant to explode inflight, so the place where the debris has fallen was much closer to any land than the usual "intentional" rocket debris. If the flight was successful, Starship's second stage would simulate landing in the Indian Ocean and then sink (and probably also explode while sinking and the debris could show up on the coast of Australia). They aren't allowed to land this thing on land yet, and with this failure they certainly won't be allowed to do that soon.
>What numbers are you looking at that makes it seem like it's "hilariously common"?
Devo wrote a funny song about it in the seventies, so it is kind of funny and it wasn't invented last week.
That was Skylab hysteria, right?
Before even!
I'm gonna disagree and say that rocket debris from exploded launches is not "hilariously common" without some citation.
The case could be made that it's similar to other debris that washes up on most beaches every day though.
They got Capone on tax evasion. I don’t really care what they get Elon on as long as it’s true.
Capone wasn't the acting President.
elect a clown, expect the whole circus
Neither is Elon. Sure, he's currently his best buddy, but there's no telling how long that will last. There are many intrigues at the court of King Donald...
Elon might as well be President in everything but name.
Elon has done and will do more for humanity than almost anyone.
You’re a victim of the disinformation establishment. Try to think critically, rather than emotionally - and base that critical thinking on reality instead of human narratives. One issue is that facts are only as good as their “authoritative” source.
One good example is the purported fascist salute. It’s been funny seeing the clips of so many on the Left (BHO, HRC, Harris, Trudeau and many more) making the exact same gesture with nary a peep from anyone.
As the article mentions, because Starship is being launched from Texas, it overflies inhabited areas. If it were launched from Cape Canaveral, it wouldn't - and debris falling into the ocean gathers much less attention than debris falling in someone's back yard...