4 ms·
Would spacex be liable if one of their satellites hits your car or house?
by suifbwish 5y ago
Would spacex be liable if one of their satellites hits your car or house?
- iam-TJ 5y agoIf you can build your house, or drive your car, at that altitude I rather think you'd be the one being liable! :D (based on the fact these satellites are designed to burn up completely upon re-entry into Earth's atmosphere and so no 'chunks' reach the surface)
- labster 5y agoIf there’s so little atmosphere that a Starlink doesn’t burn up before it hits your car, the ICE engine would have trouble running anyway.
- dotancohen 5y agoHow modified would a Tesla Cybertruck need to be to run on the moon?
- sneak 5y agoIf I had to guess, probably quite a bit. I doubt the battery cells or the electronics would hold up under hard vacuum. I recall a story posted here that if you put an iPhone in helium it will break the MEMS components inside of it and it will fail to boot, and that's still at 1 atmosphere.
- dotancohen 5y agoThe battery is already sealed, and 1 atmosphere isn't a lot of pressure to contain. It might even be able to be pressurized to quite a bit less. Regarding the electronics, engineering-wise that's a solved problem. And it would only need the drivetrain and charging electronics. I suppose that a wider track would be useful in 1/3 G, but that is a mod that off-roaders have been doing at home for decades. Ditto ride height and wheel size. I would not be surprised to see a Cybertruck offloading from a Starship someday, maybe even on a private mission after Artemis finishes.
- wahern 5y agoYes. But they're designed to burn up on entry. I think it's been mentioned on HN that the delay in their laser link network was due to the need to redesign the laser component to ensure it would break up.
- barbecue_sauce 5y agoWhen people say something will "burn up on reentry", a phrase that I've heard almost all of my life but never really given much thought too, how burnt are we talking? Surely it doesn't just completely atomize?
- bipvanwinkle 5y agoI’d love to know more about this too.
- Lev1a 5y agoI don't know specifically but as a layman I'd imagine the satellite breaking up into smaller and smaller pieces due to the rapid heating and the "wind resistance"(?) from making contact with the atmosphere at high speeds. I'd also imagine that at some point in this breaking-up-process the pieces are small enough to sublimate from the extreme heat, i.e. "burning up".
- MPSimmons 5y agoDo you remember, back when SpaceX used aluminum grid fins, when you'd see a Stage 1 re-entering, and you could watch the grid fins erode away in realtime video? Think of that, but for, well, everything.
- sennight 5y agoYou know how racecars spectacularly fly to pieces when they crash? That is by design - as it rapidly sheds energy. Same thing applies to things that "burn up on reentry", so long as you prevent the thing from coming down as one solid lump of glowing hot metal - the surface area to mass ratio renders the fragments harmless. I wonder if anyone has ever tested the whole thing about field mice surviving a drop from any height due to their low terminal velocity... those bat bombs in WWII don't count.
- dharmab 5y agoSmall satellites like Starlink burn up in athmosphere. But if you're curious about liability laws for falling satellites, here's the relevant UN convention: http://www.unoosa.org/pdf/gares/ARES_26_2777E.pdf http://www.unoosa.org/pdf/gares/ARES_26_2777E.pdf
- wahern 5y agoThat convention makes states (i.e. national governments) liable, but doesn't by itself make SpaceX liable. I assume SpaceX would be liable under ordinary tort law in the U.S., irrespective of the convention. At least for claims against U.S. nationals, the convention is probably mostly irrelevant; it's purpose is to act as a backstop in case compensation can't be found using normal legal procedures--e.g. courts won't otherwise hear a claim (AFAIU, the U.S. is relatively liberal in permitting foreign entities to sue in domestic courts for all manner of situations, and to do so on equal footing), or the entity is unable to pay compensation, in which cases the state signatory effectively acts as a guarantor for all the entities within its jurisdiction.
- mlindner 5y ago> That convention makes states (i.e. national governments) liable, but doesn't by itself make SpaceX liable. The US is liable for any damage from space SpaceX causes in a different country. If it hits a house in the US, that's a completely different question.
- yurishimo 5y agoProbably? But I imagine that won't/can't happen because the satellite is likely designed to burn upon reentry. It would seriously surprise me if no regulatory body thought of this before they sent thousands into LEO.
- sp332 5y agoYeah, I mean to be specific your homeowners' insurance would pay you directly for "falling debris", but then they would go sue SpaceX to get their money back.
- derekp7 5y agoThis reminds me of an episode of Jim Henson's TV series Dinosaurs where a space rock hits the Sinclairs' house, and the insurance refuses to pay out. Because they had "meteor" insurance, so their house would only be covered if it was floating in the upper atmosphere at the time of the strike. Instead, the insurance said their house was hit with a meteorite (a meteor that reached the ground), which wasn't covered under their policy.