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.”
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?
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.
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.
Edit: menu as in "open link in new tab"
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...
Starship broke up in beautiful rainbow.
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.
(No other opinions implied or denied btw, just my observation)
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"?
Definitely a case to be made for littering though.
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.
Devo wrote a funny song about it in the seventies, so it is kind of funny and it wasn't invented last week.
The case could be made that it's similar to other debris that washes up on most beaches every day though.
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.
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...
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.
Well, maybe not you, but almost everybody praises scroll to zoom in map applications.
In what sense is that true?