5 ms·

Did Space Debris Hit A United Flight Over The Rockies Thursday?

36 points by sipofwater 1y ago

TruffleLabs 1y ago
More info here https://viewfromthewing.com/united-captain-says-his-plane-was-hit-by-space-debris-at-36000-feet-new-photos-show-cockpit-damage/ https://viewfromthewing.com/united-captain-says-his-plane-wa...
dflock 1y ago
Interesting! There are ~2 starlink satellites re-entering the atmosphere _every day_ now - and this is only set to increase. I wonder if this was caused by starlink debris?
- imglorp 1y ago
  The starlink satellites are designed to burn up in the atmosphere. They do this pretty often. But there's plenty of other space junk that's not designed to burn up and should have shown up on radar.
  - CaptainOfCoit 1y ago
    And the Titanic was designed to not sink, sometimes reality is harsh. What is the probability for any of the parts of a starlink satallite to survive a descent?
    - darthnebula 1y ago
      Boy, you just really wish you could blame this on Starlink.
      - RomanAlexander 1y ago
        cool yeah neat but you can contend with the reality that it does happen right? https://www.pcmag.com/news/spacex-actually-dying-starlink-satellites-dont-always-fully-burn-up https://www.pcmag.com/news/spacex-actually-dying-starlink-sa...
        imglorp 1y ago
        I was excited to see some evidence, but if you actually read the article they're talking about flakes of silicon with less than one joule of energy reaching the surface. To break an airliner windscreen, you need an energy more like a big hammer.
        cachemoney1 1y ago
        From the article: > In one rare instance, the company also revealed that "a 2.5 kg piece of aluminum" found on farm grounds in Saskatchewan, Canada, was traced to a Starlink satellite. A piece of debris of similar size to this is what I'd guess could cause the kind of damage we see in the incident involving the airliner. So while most Starlink debris may be harmless by the time it reaches the surface, we know this doesn't always happen as expected. And since the vast majority of reentering space debris is from Starlink satellites, that'd would be the first place I'd look. To be totally clear, I am doubtful this is actually caused by space debris, but I don't think it's entirely unreasonable for it to be one of the most likely causes.
    - potato3732842 1y ago
      Way less likely than the non-burned up remainder of some item from decades ago that was never specifically designed to burn up because "that's hard and it'll probably hit the ocean anyway" It's hard to overstate just how much random junk is up there.
  - Rebelgecko 1y ago
    I haven't read the latest version of their ODAR (orbital debris assessment), but earlier versions of the satellites had a couple pounds of material that wasn't expected to burn up
  - notacoward 1y ago
    > The starlink satellites are designed to burn up in the atmosphere. How high in the atmosphere, though? They're not likely to hit the ground, sure, but 36,000 feet isn't the ground. Second, designs fail. 432 Park was designed not to have cracking and spalling concrete, yet NYT has a story today about exactly those things. Third, people lie about designs and capabilities. Pretty sure anyone who has ever worked in computing (especially with VC involved) has seen that. Who made that claim, and did they ever back it up? I'm not saying that Starlink is the culprit here. The evidence is thin. OTOH the possibility can't just be dismissed because of a claim about a design to prevent a similar (but not identical) thing.
    - MaxikCZ 1y ago
      I pressume its much easier to design something to burn than to do anything else. You are basically just restricting yourself on material selection. The goal isnt for something to not fail, the goal is to fail. Its like asking to build a lawnmower that doesnt have to cut grass, and can look however you want. If you produce a pebble, it fits those criteria. The atmospheric entrance for these (starlink) sattelites is basically as shallow as possible, so the object spends the most time possible in high atmosphere (think 60-90 km, where the atmo is thick enough to engulf the object in plasma, yet extert low pressure to slow it down, prolonging the time its burning. In otherwords, you couldnt achieve better parameters to burn stuff on deorbit. All of it will probably be fully burned way before 50km - planes fly at 8-12
      - notacoward 1y ago
        "Probably"? Even in their defense you felt a need to hedge, and that should tell you something. As another commenter has pointed out, Starlink has admitted that some components might survive re-entry. Let's not fall all over ourselves trying to give Musk and Co. more benefit of the doubt than they even give themselves.
        MaxikCZ 1y ago
        Im just a rando on the internet, Ive never inspected the sats to know if they are not using materials that just wont burn up, hence "probably". Im just listing facts to help you make a picture, I am not trying to "defend" anyone/anything. Please try to free your political/corporate bias from ingesting new information.
  - behringer 1y ago
    Are they designed to be completely burned up by the time they reach 38,000 feet above the ground?
  - avs733 1y ago
    1) if this was big enough to get picked up on a 737 radar I think we would be having a very different conversation... 2) even if it did... rentry velocity is like miles per second, that would give you on the order of single digit seconds to recognize something on an intersecting trajectory and take action... 3) even then, I would bet that an object on this trajectory and speed would get filtered out as noise by aircraft radar because it is so antithetical to the types of things an airliner needs to inform pilots of.
gortok 1y ago
Two events each having a low probability is not the same thing as the events not happening. Despite our best efforts, folks still win the lottery, and you’re more likely to get struck by lightning than win the powerball jackpot. So while it can be extremely unlikely from a probability standpoint that this plane was stuck by space debris, and it can also be extremely unlikely that he saw it before it hit, it’s not a false statement just because the probability says it’s unlikely. And of course, despite probability, folks still get struck by lightning.
- rzzzt 1y ago
  Do lottery winners get struck by lightning?
  - arcanemachiner 1y ago
    At least once: https://www.google.com/amp/s/abcnews.go.com/amp/International/canadian-mans-lottery-win-lightning-strike-26-trillion/story%3fid=32590554 https://www.google.com/amp/s/abcnews.go.com/amp/Internationa...
    - foofoo12 1y ago
      It sounds like some deity of fortune frantically balancing the books before an audit.
  - Calavar 1y ago
    Apparently yes: https://abcnews.go.com/International/canadian-mans-lottery-win-lightning-strike-26-trillion/story?id=32590554 https://abcnews.go.com/International/canadian-mans-lottery-w...
    - aspenmayer 1y ago
      Appreciate the non-AMP link.
- pxeger1 1y ago
  > folks still win the lottery, and you’re more likely to get struck by lightning than win the powerball jackpot I'm more likely to get struck by lightning than win the lottery, sure. But it's much more likely that someone wins the lottery this week (~100% in fact) than that someone gets struck by lightning this week. Edit: my point about independence of events still stands, but it turns out people get struck by lightning amazingly often. The chance of someone in the world getting struck by lightning this week seems to be about 99%!
CaptainOfCoit 1y ago
> So what’s the risk of space debris to aviation? An FAA report from 2023 estimated an annual 0.1% chance that falling space debris would cause a single global aviation casualty. That meant individual passenger risk was less than a trillion‑to‑one though projected to increase. I wonder if a report done in October 2025 would give a different estimate, considering we have a lot more stuff in space now compared to 2023.
- mapmeld 1y ago
  An annual 0.1% chance of one casualty (so: a passenger jet less than 1 in 1,000 years) doesn't become significantly more likely in two years. Also I assume the FAA actuaries would have forward projections of Starlink launches. Maybe this is space shuttle math where real-world accidents tell us that the risk is significantly higher. But it'd be the first documented case of a meteor or space debris, so I'd guess it's still unlikely.
  - CaptainOfCoit 1y ago
    > An annual 0.1% chance of one casualty (so: a passenger jet less than 1 in 1,000 years) doesn't become significantly more likely in two years Well, not by itself, but isn't that risk based on how many numbers of objects there are in space? And since we're launching more stuff into space than falls out of it, the numbers used for the calculations may be changing?
- Hilift 1y ago
  I sense an incoming report supporting the space hail theory.
SwiftyBug 1y ago
I have a paralyzing phobia of flying. I do, but It's always many hours of sheer terror. In my paranoia, I recently unlocked a new concern about air travel: what if a meteorite hits the plane? That would certainly be catastrophic. And now I've acquired a new one, space debris! Nice.
- tgv 1y ago
  I think this shows a hit by a small meteorite or space shrapnel is well survivable. It might even be a thought that can help you cope.
- sorokod 1y ago
  You could get hit by a meteorite or space debris without flying too. Not sure if this helps though...
- QuiEgo 1y ago
  You could get hit by a meteorite walking down the street, taking a train, or driving a car too. There's some degree of things we just can't do anything about. We just have to accept it and move on. There's something about the human condition that makes it easy to say, and hard to do, and harder for some people than others - wishing you luck on your journey. Focus on what you can control (exercise is a miracle drug that will lower your risk of so many problems! Don't smoke! Use sunscreen!) and enjoy life as best you can.
  - virgildotcodes 1y ago
    I know you're trying to help, but genuine phobias don't typically yield to rational deconstruction.
- 1970-01-01 1y ago
  Well, this is the first time this has happened in all aviation history, and nobody died.
lsllc 1y ago
When TWA Flight 800 went down over Long Island in 1996, there were at the time multiple witness statements of a "streak of light" which had been reported (and later discounted by the investigation) as a possible missile. Although the odds are incredibly slim, I wondered around the time if it could have actually been a meteorite striking the aircraft, passing through the fuel tank and causing the explosion. Presumably it would have been moving very quickly, might have looked like a missile to an observer, and wouldn't have left any shrapnel debris/marks in the wreckage. I would imagine that the space debris mentioned in the article would be a lot less dense and moving much more slowly (relatively speaking) than a meteorite at the impact with the aircraft. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TWA_Flight_800 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TWA_Flight_800
M95D 1y ago
Captain's arm was injured by debris, but no decompression? How did they get past the windshield? Also, those scratchs look days old. Not a drop of blood visible. Smells like fake news.
- serial_dev 1y ago
  To me, the scratches could be new or a couple of hours old. They look like superficial scratches and cuts, they can heal quickly when the person is healthy.
- the_duke 1y ago
  For a potential pilot (username), you are jumping to odd conclusions here... * This looks relatively convincing. https://avherald.com/h?article=52e80701 https://avherald.com/h?article=52e80701 https://x.com/oeingoboeing/status/1979588783982133360 https://x.com/oeingoboeing/status/1979588783982133360 * They obviously would have cleaned up the wounds... this can be a few hours old , surface wounds build crusts quickly
- sml156 1y ago
  I am more concerned with the way the left window is held on using a big paperclip
AnimalMuppet 1y ago
Why divert to SLC from there? Looks like Las Vegas was at least as close. Would the elevation of the airport matter (for air pressure on that cracked windshield)? Did they pick SLC because it's higher?
sipofwater 1y ago
"Something from “space” may have just struck a United Airlines flight over Utah" "“NTSB gathering radar, weather, flight recorder data.”": https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/10/something-from-space-may-have-just-struck-a-united-airlines-flight-over-utah/ https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/10/something-from-space-m... (arstechnica.com/space/2025/10/something-from-space-may-have-just-struck-a-united-airlines-flight-over-utah/)

36 points by sipofwater 1y ago

More info here https://viewfromthewing.com/united-captain-says-his-plane-was-hit-by-space-debris-at-36000-feet-new-photos-show-cockpit-damage/ https://viewfromthewing.com/united-captain-says-his-plane-wa...

dflock 1y ago

Interesting! There are ~2 starlink satellites re-entering the atmosphere _every day_ now - and this is only set to increase. I wonder if this was caused by starlink debris?

imglorp 1y ago
The starlink satellites are designed to burn up in the atmosphere. They do this pretty often. But there's plenty of other space junk that's not designed to burn up and should have shown up on radar.
- CaptainOfCoit 1y ago
  And the Titanic was designed to not sink, sometimes reality is harsh. What is the probability for any of the parts of a starlink satallite to survive a descent?
  - darthnebula 1y ago
    Boy, you just really wish you could blame this on Starlink.
    - RomanAlexander 1y ago
      cool yeah neat but you can contend with the reality that it does happen right? https://www.pcmag.com/news/spacex-actually-dying-starlink-satellites-dont-always-fully-burn-up https://www.pcmag.com/news/spacex-actually-dying-starlink-sa...
      - imglorp 1y ago
        I was excited to see some evidence, but if you actually read the article they're talking about flakes of silicon with less than one joule of energy reaching the surface. To break an airliner windscreen, you need an energy more like a big hammer.
        cachemoney1 1y ago
        From the article: > In one rare instance, the company also revealed that "a 2.5 kg piece of aluminum" found on farm grounds in Saskatchewan, Canada, was traced to a Starlink satellite. A piece of debris of similar size to this is what I'd guess could cause the kind of damage we see in the incident involving the airliner. So while most Starlink debris may be harmless by the time it reaches the surface, we know this doesn't always happen as expected. And since the vast majority of reentering space debris is from Starlink satellites, that'd would be the first place I'd look. To be totally clear, I am doubtful this is actually caused by space debris, but I don't think it's entirely unreasonable for it to be one of the most likely causes.
  - potato3732842 1y ago
    Way less likely than the non-burned up remainder of some item from decades ago that was never specifically designed to burn up because "that's hard and it'll probably hit the ocean anyway" It's hard to overstate just how much random junk is up there.
- Rebelgecko 1y ago
  I haven't read the latest version of their ODAR (orbital debris assessment), but earlier versions of the satellites had a couple pounds of material that wasn't expected to burn up
- notacoward 1y ago
  > The starlink satellites are designed to burn up in the atmosphere. How high in the atmosphere, though? They're not likely to hit the ground, sure, but 36,000 feet isn't the ground. Second, designs fail. 432 Park was designed not to have cracking and spalling concrete, yet NYT has a story today about exactly those things. Third, people lie about designs and capabilities. Pretty sure anyone who has ever worked in computing (especially with VC involved) has seen that. Who made that claim, and did they ever back it up? I'm not saying that Starlink is the culprit here. The evidence is thin. OTOH the possibility can't just be dismissed because of a claim about a design to prevent a similar (but not identical) thing.
  - MaxikCZ 1y ago
    I pressume its much easier to design something to burn than to do anything else. You are basically just restricting yourself on material selection. The goal isnt for something to not fail, the goal is to fail. Its like asking to build a lawnmower that doesnt have to cut grass, and can look however you want. If you produce a pebble, it fits those criteria. The atmospheric entrance for these (starlink) sattelites is basically as shallow as possible, so the object spends the most time possible in high atmosphere (think 60-90 km, where the atmo is thick enough to engulf the object in plasma, yet extert low pressure to slow it down, prolonging the time its burning. In otherwords, you couldnt achieve better parameters to burn stuff on deorbit. All of it will probably be fully burned way before 50km - planes fly at 8-12
    - notacoward 1y ago
      "Probably"? Even in their defense you felt a need to hedge, and that should tell you something. As another commenter has pointed out, Starlink has admitted that some components might survive re-entry. Let's not fall all over ourselves trying to give Musk and Co. more benefit of the doubt than they even give themselves.
      - MaxikCZ 1y ago
        Im just a rando on the internet, Ive never inspected the sats to know if they are not using materials that just wont burn up, hence "probably". Im just listing facts to help you make a picture, I am not trying to "defend" anyone/anything. Please try to free your political/corporate bias from ingesting new information.
- behringer 1y ago
  Are they designed to be completely burned up by the time they reach 38,000 feet above the ground?
- avs733 1y ago
  1) if this was big enough to get picked up on a 737 radar I think we would be having a very different conversation... 2) even if it did... rentry velocity is like miles per second, that would give you on the order of single digit seconds to recognize something on an intersecting trajectory and take action... 3) even then, I would bet that an object on this trajectory and speed would get filtered out as noise by aircraft radar because it is so antithetical to the types of things an airliner needs to inform pilots of.

gortok 1y ago

Two events each having a low probability is not the same thing as the events not happening. Despite our best efforts, folks still win the lottery, and you’re more likely to get struck by lightning than win the powerball jackpot. So while it can be extremely unlikely from a probability standpoint that this plane was stuck by space debris, and it can also be extremely unlikely that he saw it before it hit, it’s not a false statement just because the probability says it’s unlikely. And of course, despite probability, folks still get struck by lightning.

rzzzt 1y ago
Do lottery winners get struck by lightning?
- arcanemachiner 1y ago
  At least once: https://www.google.com/amp/s/abcnews.go.com/amp/International/canadian-mans-lottery-win-lightning-strike-26-trillion/story%3fid=32590554 https://www.google.com/amp/s/abcnews.go.com/amp/Internationa...
  - foofoo12 1y ago
    It sounds like some deity of fortune frantically balancing the books before an audit.
- Calavar 1y ago
  Apparently yes: https://abcnews.go.com/International/canadian-mans-lottery-win-lightning-strike-26-trillion/story?id=32590554 https://abcnews.go.com/International/canadian-mans-lottery-w...
  - aspenmayer 1y ago
    Appreciate the non-AMP link.
pxeger1 1y ago
> folks still win the lottery, and you’re more likely to get struck by lightning than win the powerball jackpot I'm more likely to get struck by lightning than win the lottery, sure. But it's much more likely that someone wins the lottery this week (~100% in fact) than that someone gets struck by lightning this week. Edit: my point about independence of events still stands, but it turns out people get struck by lightning amazingly often. The chance of someone in the world getting struck by lightning this week seems to be about 99%!

CaptainOfCoit 1y ago

> So what’s the risk of space debris to aviation? An FAA report from 2023 estimated an annual 0.1% chance that falling space debris would cause a single global aviation casualty. That meant individual passenger risk was less than a trillion‑to‑one though projected to increase. I wonder if a report done in October 2025 would give a different estimate, considering we have a lot more stuff in space now compared to 2023.

mapmeld 1y ago
An annual 0.1% chance of one casualty (so: a passenger jet less than 1 in 1,000 years) doesn't become significantly more likely in two years. Also I assume the FAA actuaries would have forward projections of Starlink launches. Maybe this is space shuttle math where real-world accidents tell us that the risk is significantly higher. But it'd be the first documented case of a meteor or space debris, so I'd guess it's still unlikely.
- CaptainOfCoit 1y ago
  > An annual 0.1% chance of one casualty (so: a passenger jet less than 1 in 1,000 years) doesn't become significantly more likely in two years Well, not by itself, but isn't that risk based on how many numbers of objects there are in space? And since we're launching more stuff into space than falls out of it, the numbers used for the calculations may be changing?
Hilift 1y ago
I sense an incoming report supporting the space hail theory.

SwiftyBug 1y ago

I have a paralyzing phobia of flying. I do, but It's always many hours of sheer terror. In my paranoia, I recently unlocked a new concern about air travel: what if a meteorite hits the plane? That would certainly be catastrophic. And now I've acquired a new one, space debris! Nice.

tgv 1y ago
I think this shows a hit by a small meteorite or space shrapnel is well survivable. It might even be a thought that can help you cope.
sorokod 1y ago
You could get hit by a meteorite or space debris without flying too. Not sure if this helps though...
QuiEgo 1y ago
You could get hit by a meteorite walking down the street, taking a train, or driving a car too. There's some degree of things we just can't do anything about. We just have to accept it and move on. There's something about the human condition that makes it easy to say, and hard to do, and harder for some people than others - wishing you luck on your journey. Focus on what you can control (exercise is a miracle drug that will lower your risk of so many problems! Don't smoke! Use sunscreen!) and enjoy life as best you can.
- virgildotcodes 1y ago
  I know you're trying to help, but genuine phobias don't typically yield to rational deconstruction.
1970-01-01 1y ago
Well, this is the first time this has happened in all aviation history, and nobody died.

lsllc 1y ago

When TWA Flight 800 went down over Long Island in 1996, there were at the time multiple witness statements of a "streak of light" which had been reported (and later discounted by the investigation) as a possible missile. Although the odds are incredibly slim, I wondered around the time if it could have actually been a meteorite striking the aircraft, passing through the fuel tank and causing the explosion. Presumably it would have been moving very quickly, might have looked like a missile to an observer, and wouldn't have left any shrapnel debris/marks in the wreckage. I would imagine that the space debris mentioned in the article would be a lot less dense and moving much more slowly (relatively speaking) than a meteorite at the impact with the aircraft. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TWA_Flight_800 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TWA_Flight_800

M95D 1y ago

Captain's arm was injured by debris, but no decompression? How did they get past the windshield? Also, those scratchs look days old. Not a drop of blood visible. Smells like fake news.

serial_dev 1y ago
To me, the scratches could be new or a couple of hours old. They look like superficial scratches and cuts, they can heal quickly when the person is healthy.
the_duke 1y ago
For a potential pilot (username), you are jumping to odd conclusions here... * This looks relatively convincing. https://avherald.com/h?article=52e80701 https://avherald.com/h?article=52e80701 https://x.com/oeingoboeing/status/1979588783982133360 https://x.com/oeingoboeing/status/1979588783982133360 * They obviously would have cleaned up the wounds... this can be a few hours old , surface wounds build crusts quickly
sml156 1y ago
I am more concerned with the way the left window is held on using a big paperclip

AnimalMuppet 1y ago

Why divert to SLC from there? Looks like Las Vegas was at least as close. Would the elevation of the airport matter (for air pressure on that cracked windshield)? Did they pick SLC because it's higher?

sipofwater 1y ago

"Something from “space” may have just struck a United Airlines flight over Utah" "“NTSB gathering radar, weather, flight recorder data.”": https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/10/something-from-space-may-have-just-struck-a-united-airlines-flight-over-utah/ https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/10/something-from-space-m... (arstechnica.com/space/2025/10/something-from-space-may-have-just-struck-a-united-airlines-flight-over-utah/)