This is one of the more remote flights humanity operates. What even are the diversion points on this route, McMurdo airfield?
I'm not an Elon shrill but this seems as an ideal place for SpaceX to be re-entering things as they can choose with minimal damage to ecosystems.
(Your core point is correct, this trajectory is about as remote as SpaceX can possibly get, even if it's near a small number of flights. Let's not extend NIMBYism to space and ban SpaceX from everywhere.)
https://www.flightaware.com/live/flight/QFA63/history/202501...
For example, if an aircraft is rated for ETOPS-180, it means that it is able to fly with full load and just one engine for three hours. [1]
Obviously in this case it 5hours 30 minutes on one engine at full load.
-- Slight edit: Unclear if with a 4 engine its rated with 2 functional or still 1 functional engine.
And while technically different rules, ETOPS in practice gets attached to other requirements for transoceanic flights, so ETOPS aircraft often have additional life rafts and other equipment.
The extra fuel burn is due to the drag from pushing a non-working engine through the air, and from the rudder deflection to counteract the unequal thrust. It’s less of an issue on a four engine aircraft with a single engine out as they can increase thrust on the remaining engine on the side with the engine out.
Extra fuel burn is also required because a twin engine aircraft with an engine out can’t maintain the normal cruising altitude, and the higher you are the more efficient the engines are.
Thrust can’t be reduced much to save fuel because the speed margins at altitude are quite narrow - if they reduce thrust and therefore airspeed they’ll descend.
Do they also decrease the opposite engine to help with this as well?
Aircraft with disabled flight controls have occasionally steered / maneuvered utilising variable engine thrust alone. A notable instance is UA 232 (1989), Denver Stapleton to Chicago O'Hare, which crashed on landing at Sioux City, Iowa. Despite a nearly completely disabled aircraft and a violent landing, there were 184 survivors of 296 souls, including the pilot Alfred Clair Haynes (he died in 2019, aged 87).
The aircraft, a DC-10, suffered an uncontained fan failure which severed all three hydraulic control systems, disabling virtually all flight control surfaces (elevators, ailerons, rudder), and the pilots (with assistance from a dead-heading pilot/instructor passenger) controlled both horizontal and vertical orientation using engine thrust alone.
I've heard and read numerous times that in simulations of the incident afterwards few or no pilots managed to land the plane. Haynes was an absolute master pilot.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_232#Att...>
The acronym ETOPS is sometimes jokingly expanded to Engines Turn Or Passengers Swim... but, in this case, it is perhaps closer to reality than usual.
Most flights will never be impacted this way.
This is just trash. Debris as they call it.
If drive in front of you on a highway and throw some "debris" out of the window, will you enjoy it ?
I wonder what the math is on the plane actually getting hit if it took it's normal route.
Unfortunately "got hit by space debris in designated NOTAM area" looks bad in headlines.
Heavily debatable.
And you're equating to SpaceX dumping debris and trash in addition to their original flight path to a plane's flight path. Those are not equal things.
Yes. Much more so than that one weird flight that's "merely profitable for a single company".
> Do we all get a profit sharing check at some point?
Yes, in the form of more space sector jobs, more jobs and economic benefits that come from more kinds of useful stuff being launched to space more often, and eventually - hopefully - more jobs in space and economic benefits coming from that.
I once had a flight from Puerto Rico to Chicago delayed because of a (SpaceX) launch at Cape Canaveral that happened exactly within the planned launch window. On the plus side, the flight was delayed just barely enough to be “safe” - we got to watch the second stage separation off in the distance just by looking out the window at whatever the 737 cruising altitude is.
I’d guess that space launches just aren’t numerous enough to bother modifying commercial aviation schedules, so they don’t (SpaceX or not). When it looks like a launch is actually going to happen and not get scrubbed, they clear a hole in the sky and then get on with their day.
I wonder if the Brightline extension will cause a decrease in cruises at Canaveral and a corresponding increase at Ft. Lauderdale/Miami.
More importantly can someone remind me what warning did the Chinese rockets provide or competitors? Not that that is a standard we should measure against.
Falcon 9 destroys its upper stages in a controlled manner, in a deliberately chosen re-entry zone (sparsely populated ocean). Ariane 5's cryogenic upper stage can't do this: it's a liquid-hydrogen engine without a relight ability—after it turns off once, you can't reignite it a second time (for a re-entry targeting burn).
Because of the authoritarian government with a history of abuse, or because they're not around to complain?
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/u978rksgjrtvusfmpt36k/IMG_896...
I've seen it. It's kind of cool. 8 pale, silent dots in line moving across the sky for like 3 minutes.
I'm sure they've seen airplanes flying at night with brighter lights, and louder noises than what starlink produces, so I'm not sure how this is really a problem.
globe.adsbexchange.com -> click the replay button, and then scrub to some random time after sunset in CA. Turn on flight tracks and set the speed to 100x to make the flights easier to identify.
Flights from major airlines coming from Alaska, Asia, and Hawaii seem to frequently fly directly over Catalina at night.
For what its worth planes generally avoid flying through designated dark sky areas.
By that, do you mean they can't see the starlink satellites now with their eyes, despite the number of them? Or do you mean that before they didn't see anything and now it is a problem and they are seeing things with their naked eyes?
(They were arguably also one of the most interesting and inspiring phenomena on the sky, too. I miss them.)
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/26/chinese-rocket-crushes-house...
> Qantas says it has been forced to delay several of its flights to South Africa at the last minute due to warnings of falling debris from Elon Musk’s SpaceX rockets re-entering Earth.
Leading paragraph.
My reading is that SpaceX was loose with their windows because it’s easier and they didn’t think it mattered in a remote part of the ocean. Now that there’s an actual reason, they’ll probably tighten it up.
Nobody is flying or sailing at Point Nemo. The keepout zone typically has a massive 1000km diameter, but approximately 0 impact on anybody.
It looks like this flight is maybe a bit south of Nemo, but in the relative vicinity.
"Santiago Chile to Sydney AUS, 2-3x a week" [0]
The one thing they can do is be sure the original trajectory that gets them to space intersects the Earth within some reason so that if things don't go as planned it doesn't go too far afield.
At best this article is a complaint about communication of whether or not a launch is happening. And even that's hard to really do reasonably: weather, maybe a stuck valve during the countdown, maybe a leisure boat close to the launch site enters the exclusion area... all of those things have happened and prompted changes in launch times and many of those things are outside of SpaceX control.
So seems to me you can lock up the airspace on a "just in case" basis with lots of advanced warning but also reserving lots of time that you won't really need in the end... you know... just in case... , or lock it up much less, but at the cost of relatively short notice to others that might want to use it. Either way you'd still get the article protesting... it's just the complaint would be different.
I also want to point out SpaceX still does a better job than some competitors (ahem, ariane, which gets a pass because it's the eurocrat's baby therefore must be good)
They've rescheduled a few times now and each time operators flying in this region have to shuffle things around.
By listening to the transponder messages which give altitude, GPS location, velocity and call sign you can 'see' the stage as it moves through the air like any other vehicle traffic.
Do rockets broadcast ADS-B?
Trad terrestrial ADS-B: https://www.flightaware.com/adsb/
Space-based ADS-B: https://aireon.com/its-just-ads-b/
It's hard to emphasize how comically vast the region described is. Its like... shooting two marbles across Manhattan and colliding.
