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Starlink satellite part hit a Canadian farm when it fell from orbit
- oaiey 2y agoAm I the only one who think: "Canadian government officials joking about that 'Musk is throwing now satellites at them'".
- markus_zhang 2y agoOrbital bombardment!
- moralestapia 2y agoThey should get some sort of compensation, even if no one was injured.
- theoreticalmal 2y agoThey did. Aluminum has good scrap value these days.
- RandomBacon 2y agoI should get some sort of compensation for seeing your comment – it caused pixels on my computer to change, even if it didn't hurt me. On a more serious note, maybe if their courts allowed for the property owner to sue SpaceX for littering? Otherwise the actual damage is deminimis and courts generally don't allow compensation for "what-if"s.
- moralestapia 2y agoI know you ... can't do better than this. But ... private land is protected by the law while your HP Pavillion browsing the web is not. That's part of its intended use.
- RandomBacon 2y agoYou're the judge and jury, how much should SpaceX pay the property owner for what happened?
- moralestapia 2y agoI would do punitive damages, significant but not phenomenal, let's say 50k USD. To set a precedence and encourage them to make sure this kind of thing does not ever happen again.
- Havoc 2y agoCanadians catching all sorts of strays these days
- perihelions 2y agohttps://archive.is/5ZljY https://archive.is/5ZljY Primary source linked therein, (.pdf) https://www.starlink.com/public-files/Starlink_Approach_to_Satellite_Demisability.pdf https://www.starlink.com/public-files/Starlink_Approach_to_S... ("Starlink Approach to Satellite Demisability") - "On August 20, 2024, a 2.5 kg piece of aluminum was found on the ground in a farm in Saskatchewan, Canada, and determined by SpaceX engineers to have come from a Starlink satellite that reentered following the erroneous Falcon G9-3 deploy. The debris was traced by SpaceX engineers to a specific satellite and part – a modem enclosure lid of the backhaul antenna on a Starlink direct-to-cell satellite. This part was predicted to fully demise by both the NASA and ESA tools and is the only known Starlink fragment to have not done so."
- verzali 2y agoThat's not great, especially since SpaceX apparently expected the component to burn up in the atmosphere. Given there are thousands of them up there, and all must re-enter over the next decade or so, that's a lot of potential debris impacts on the ground.
- danielvf 2y agoNote that this was from a failed launch - this debris was not from old starlink satellites falling out of operating orbits.
- perihelions 2y agoThese satellites deorbit into oceans, not land, if they're functioning.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- josefritzishere 2y agoLittering. That's a $250 fine
- cz_the_lee 2y agoThis is only one of many reported - there's Canadian news coverage from earlier last year that SpaceX conveniently left out of their own report https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatoon/cp-space-junk-more-reports-1.7219927 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatoon/cp-space-junk-more-... Same story featured in Scientific American: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/spacex-dropped-space-junk-on-my-neighbors-farm-heres-what-happened-next/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/spacex-dropped-sp...
- iJohnDoe 2y agoOh wow, that's isn't a small piece. That's crazy big. Very dangerous.