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SpaceX slams FAA report on falling space debris danger
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Besides the problems SpaceX pointed out (that the report ignored the fact that Starlink is designed to be fully burned up upon reentry, thus will not pose a debris risk to people on the ground), the FAA/Aerospace Corp report also got the mass of F9 upper stage wrong:
25 tons is the mass of the first stage which never reaches orbit, the mass of the upper stage is around 5 tons.
So yeah, the report is a mess:
Biting the hand that gives launch licenses.
High risk behaviour!
They sued the dod to force them to become a customer. That same dod is currently very happy they lost that one.
Shotwell worked for The Aerospace Corporation* for a decade. The three mile secure phone line must be burning;) *a nonprofit California corporation as of June, 1960
Slight over simplification. The DOD funded SpaceX to become a competitor to ULA.
Are you sure, which general/governor is the DoD exactly?
In public service, costing less and providing more is a liability instead of a advantage usually :-)
I suspect Treasury is indeed happy, but no one at DoD really is…
In return they get Starshield, unlimited satellite launch capability, and soon a moon base.
it is not how it works. there are always people who want to get the assets being developed, and they suffer the delays. military operations are hindered and people may die as a result of the lack of equipment, or subpar quality.
The only other option is Russia... DoD was happy to use Russia 3 years ago, not so much anymore.
What could they do? Not challenge the report? That's even riskier for the business.
Oh no they have to challenge the report’s “facts” and conclusions.
Calling the FAA not competent to assess the report is a bit strong though - at least in my view.
Absolutely, although perhaps it displays the common sentiment for FAA at SpaceX. Starship is too long delayed, really there's no excuse.
there's a lot of incompetence at the faa. not everyone, but plenty of it to go around
Suing NASA was pretty high risk but that worked out pretty well so far
Worked for BO. Sue NASA to get Congress to force NASA's hand.
I do not recall them suing NASA. They have been on the same side on several lawsuits and challenges.
Are you thinking of the DoD lawsuit to be allowed to bid on National Security launches?
They did sue NASA when NASA awarded a closed bid contract to an old employee of theirs that was struggling, in the Falcon 1 Times. Can't remember the name of the now defunct company.
SpaceX ended up winning the contract.
I could be tbh. Literally just woke up, so my brain ain't there yet
Sue Elon.
Different department. The launch department probably hates the space debries department.
Drops aerospace microphone
I remember hearing 4 tons empty, but yea 4-5 for sure, not 25. Not even close to 25.
The mass mistake was Space News’s commentary, not the report itself. The main critique of the report that SpaceX is making is by disputing that the burn-up assumptions made for Iridium sats are irrelevant to Starlink sats.
No, it's from the report, pdf page 8, report page 4.
Shit, you’re totally right - looking at the specs, I wonder if they confused block 2 with stage 2?
Fully realize this is a SpaceX fan page but SpaceX and Elon have long disregarded the risks it creates. It turn out spacecraft “designed to burn up” is not 100% depends a lot on external factors out of their control.
Not to mention complete disregard for their own scientist and engineer warnings (concrete launchpad)?
Are Aerospace Corp and the FAA unaware that SpaceX had to submit a detailed study to the FCC showing how Starlink satellites burn up completely on reentry?
To be fair they assert on the basis of calculations that everything burns up.
There is no experimental data and it would be very hard to arrange to get such data.
Is this hypothetical? Haven’t they had sterling satellites deorbit multiple times already?
Well obviously they deorbit. The question is whether debris makes it to ground level or at least to 13,000m where it might strike a plane.
The point of entry is random along its ground track and it would need high resolution radar observation of the complete entry to be sure no debris made it through.
The most likely objects to survive entry according to SpaceX reports are the laser mirrors and the reaction control wheel hubs and these would be hard to track on radar.
I wonder if it would be worth it to make a few starlinks with the means to deorbit precisely to check experimentally that everything burns up.
Tiangong-1 was tracked by Aerospace Corp in April, 2018 and they missed the re-entry point by a thousand miles. I was following in real time.
Well they gonna fall down one day, so shitty regs should be put in place now, before they do fall down regardless.
Hundreds have already re-entered and completely burned up, as designed. You know that thousands of these things have already been successfully launched into LEO right?
Leaving metal particles. And, Elon has 6000 satelites.
Hopefully they fall on Elon.
Ignoring whether the Govt. is targeting SpaceX or not, this kind of report makes you worry about the competence of the FAA
I hope Elon is targeted with his 6000 space junk satelites for a crap internet.
Nope, not journalism if your title has 'slams' in it
Credentials revoked.
glad I'm not the only one sick of "X Slams/Bashes/Bangs/Bonks/Tickles/Farts/Sneezes Y"
Journalists do not write the title of their article so they can't be held responsible for "Elon Musk's SpaceX slams satellites into atmosphere" and the like.
Would you prefer rebukes? Slams isn't all that sensational.
It is, when you consider the theme song from the 1996 movie Space Jam.
How about politely asked for a correction due to the report missing some information.
sure
Professionals aren't generally in the business of "slamming" or any such thing. They have business to do, and that business isn't to create enemies in government regulators. So yes, he politely said the analysis (not done by FAA, but by a contractor) was flawed.
Worse yet, this could turn into bureaucratic nightmare as new satellites will have to be "certified" for deorbiting. Just a guess into the future.
Delete your comment, you’ll give them ideas!
THAT's already here; What's the pharmaceutical company that can't get FAA's permission to deorbit their prototype zero g manufacturing satellite?
That's technically correct (the best kind of correct!). The FAA licenses both launches and reentries. So if you have a vehicle that's intended to make it to the ground, you need a license to reenter the vehicle.
If you have an object not intended to reenter, but to burn up in the atmosphere, that is considered as part of the initial launch application. Generally you have to be able to control the reentry point or guarantee that the object will not pose any danger to the ground.
It's already certified like that, for Starlink. I.e. the Starlink sats are designed to demise completely on reentry, thus eliminating the risk to life from falling debris.
They should be certified for deorbiting. There's nothing wrong with that, don't expose the public to unnecessary risk.
The problem is when the risk they accept is miniscule compared to random mundane risks we accept everyday.
Talking about the contributions of upper stage disposal is a bit weird when we're talking ~2035. SpaceX should be reusing second stages with Starship hopefully a decade before that, so half or more satellites won't have any appreciable launch debris. And that's assuming no one else tries to launch megaconstellations on Starship, which... why wouldn't you?
What kills me is everything has risk. A nonzero number of kids playing football will die, a nonzero number of amusement park attendees will die, uber eats drivers are going to almost certainly kill a few bystanders a year.
A global risk of 0.5 deaths per year strikes me as exceptionally safe for such a massive widespread technology. Aircraft kill people on the ground every year, just this year alone, not counting war zones, about 10 people worldwide have been killed by airplanes crashing into them, and that's a pretty normal figure.
The 0.0007 risk of aircraft loss? So once per 1500 years there's a chance of a collision? Meanwhile what are the odds of a midair collision between aircraft? Of a birdstrike?
All these risk numbers tell me is yeah, seems pretty safe.
Number of rabies-related human deaths in the United States is one or two per year. Number of rattlesnake-related human deaths in the United States average five per year. Number of Fentanyl related deaths in Ohio average fourteen per day. See https://www.cdc.gov/
I prefer using things we gladly keep legal despite their impact as comparison points.
There's a difference between choosing to accept risks and being forced to live with them.
The Aerospace Corp/FAA report is about Government regulating risk. Since 1983, the Government has turned away from regulating risk in many industries, and yet this report argues that A global risk of >0.5 deaths per year is forcing regulators to intervene. I posed the drug industry as a corollary, see https://www.statnews.com/2015/12/11/untold-story-tvs-first-prescription-drug-ad/ And Acetaminophen overdose is the leading cause of Acute liver failure in the United States, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2504411/ and the leading cause of liver transplants, a growth industry
Behold. I was downvoted to oblivion few days ago for saying basically the same thing.
A lot of local sub members have surprisingly powerful fetish for bureaucratic procedures ...
Zero government payloads until the FAA messes are handled
god I'm so sick of the FAA. They do perform a useful public service, but this is just getting ridiculous, the amount of red tape here. If they keep this shit up, companies are going to leave the country and we'll lose capability. Someone needs to put their thumb on the scale here.
It's almost like all these people with worthless red tape jobs are just trying to justify their existence. Starship should have launched a month ago
you also have to wonder how many elon haters are sabotaging the process, the about of unadulterated hatred for this guy is at trump levels now
bureaucracy only exists to perpetuate itself.
It's a little more complicated — the report is looking at all constellations, not just Starlink:
So there could be some that don't burn up fully; we can't really know since some of the designs haven't even launched yet — including Starlink v3 which is much larger — so a conservative estimate can be justified. Still, it does sound poorly researched.
All the other constellations had little impact compared to Starlink.
When 85% of a scary metric can be attributed to a single factor, in this case how demisable Starlink satellites will be in the 2030s, you should put a little effort in to make sure that number is good. Assuming the industry average when (per the article) SpaceX is at least an order of magnitude better than that today is crazy.
Starlink v3 maybe not burning up fully wouldn't be a great reason for the FAA, if I remember correctly SpaceX had to make revisions to the Starlink v1.x design specifically to be fully demisable before they could ramp up their deployment. I don't see why they'd be able to ignore that when moving to a new design and deploying a vastly larger number of satellites.
If the FAA report wants to make the point that without strong requirements for demisability we could see occasional deaths from the sheer number of LEO sats we'll have in 2035, that's fine. To estimate the risk for Starlink specifically with unrealistic estimates is not.
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Spacenews.com article is by Jason Rainbow October 9, 2023
Yet another example of why there needs to be a separate department regulating the space industry. The FAA is either to under staffed, incompetent, or has alternative motives to be regulating anything space related any longer.
At this point the FAA needs to be considered an enemy of advancing space flight. They are beyond worthless.
Amazing to see the government go after everything Elon ownes now that he stepped out of line. Using all the 3 letter agencies to go after political enemies.
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
But the FWS delay is NOT stupidity; those folks are reasonably competent in most of what they do and understand basic weather data. Given that on the coast, Boca Chica is on the coast and experiences frequent thunderstorms and every thunderstorm that crosses over Starbase dumps 10 times as much mildly acidic (due to lightning creating NOx and southerly winds carrying pollution from Mexico) rainwater into the environment, most of it faster than the deluge system discharges municipal potable water into the same area, it would require about 10 minutes for even a STUPID person to conclude that if 10 million gallons of freshwater a couple of dozen times per year hasn't killed off the wildlife, a one time 400,000 gallon discharge isn't likely to... rather than "FAA gave us 4 months to study this, so lets not look at it till we're ready to leave for Christmas."
True, but this is far beyond what can be adequately explained by stupidity.
Elon's hobby of "troll people on Twitter for the lulz" may not be a genius-tier idea. Those same people work at organizations like the FAA and will be prejudiced against him and his companies
Not surprised Aerospace would get this so wrong. Some of their guys were chasing Mach effect pseudoscience nonsense. They’re a big mess.
Wow - to my knowledge, none of those hit their 5 year expected lifespan.
Thats either a worryingly high failure rate or a concerning tendency to launch designs that aren't yet fit-for-purpose.
You can see a detailed breakdown at https://planet4589.org/space/con/star/stats.html
128 deorbited early (malfunctioning; abandoned or actively lowered)
193 were disposed (reached operational orbit, but were then lowered to disposal orbit)
38 failed (orbit decayed, no evidence of manouvering)
He also breaks it down by group. Both tintins are down, all 60 v0.9 are down, 50 of the first 240 are down. All ten of the first experimental polar batch are down. Launch 38 (4-7) lost 38 due to the bad space weather. Things have been pretty good other than that.
Do recall that 40 of those were the ones caught in the solar flare and another 20 were the first V2 mini prototypes that turned out to have some kind of fault (never detailed) but were deorbited within weeks. Although I don't know, I'd suspect that the remaining 300 were early prototypes that were subsequently replaced by more capable ones after proving that the constellation worked for the better than nothing beta.
Rapid testing and iteration is a strength, not a weakness, so long as it's done safely.
Even Dyson didn't need to iterate 358 times when inventing his revolutionary vacuum cleaner...
Iteration is good... But if by iteration 5 you still haven't got a solidly working product, you are probably doing something wrong.
Okay but it's not like they launched one, didn't like how it was performing, revised the design and launched a new version, 358 times. That would be 358 iterations.
If it were my call, I'd want more than one data point for each variant, so they'd be made in batches. Maybe what we're seeing here is 2 competing variants made in batches of 200 and constitute a single test for an iteration. I don't know, you don't know. But there literally have not been enough Starlink launches to do 358 iterative cycles.
Blanket statements about how many iterations should be needed to make a solid product are silly. At time of writing, Chrome and Firefox are both on version 118. Some industries are more mature, some evolve rapidly. Some things are slow/expensive/risky to test and others are fast/cheap/safe. Some iterations are big, some are small.
SpaceX's approach to engineering and iteration gave us the excellent reusable Falcon 9 despite bucking industry trends. So I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt with using the same approach to Starlink.
Maybe you should look at the data before saying something this foolish? You can clearly see reliability improving for launch 6 onwards until there was a big change at launch 13, which was resolved by launch 16. Launch 24 had a blip and 38 had the space weather incident. Since then the biggest problem was launch 6-1 (9/21 failed), and I think that was the first batch of v2.
The Northstar v8 is known as a real piece of shit among mechanics
Starlink satellites are intended to be inexpensive and the failure rate is part of the development process. For a normal satellite program, losing 300+ satellites would be a big deal. For Starlink, the cost of each satellite and the overall launch costs make it an acceptable loss. Plus it makes sure that satellites that do not perform do not end up clogging up operational orbits. Post-launch but pre-orbit raising SpaceX can do extensive system checks. If a satellite fails, it's already in an orbit that will naturally allow it to safely reenter even if SpaceX cannot manually deorbit it
It's how SpaceX operates - accept that there will be failures, make the costs of failure small, and iterate after each failure.