The odds of being crushed by a rocket has people talking
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Yule have to be pretty fast to dodge that kiss!
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. -- 6079 Smith W.
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Pulling :elephant: 💩 numbers out of your :sunshine: isn't a way to build credibility.
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The chances of a meteorite killing you are far lower than you think. Wired has the number at around one in 250,000
There's only 1 documented case of someone being hit with an meteorite in history. She survived with nothing more than bruising. For the Only Person Ever Hit by a Meteorite, the Real Trouble Began Later | Smart News| Smithsonian Magazine[^]
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, weighing all things in the balance of reason? Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful? --Zachris Topelius
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Pulling :elephant: 💩 numbers out of your :sunshine: isn't a way to build credibility.
Quote:
The chances of a meteorite killing you are far lower than you think. Wired has the number at around one in 250,000
There's only 1 documented case of someone being hit with an meteorite in history. She survived with nothing more than bruising. For the Only Person Ever Hit by a Meteorite, the Real Trouble Began Later | Smart News| Smithsonian Magazine[^]
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, weighing all things in the balance of reason? Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful? --Zachris Topelius
It's even worse - this is talking about rockets and other space debris. To my memory no one has ever been hit by it. It's almost always hitting the Pacific or Indian oceans.
TTFN - Kent
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It's even worse - this is talking about rockets and other space debris. To my memory no one has ever been hit by it. It's almost always hitting the Pacific or Indian oceans.
TTFN - Kent
Yeah, that's a more complicated situation. And while the coverage in that article's bad IMO addressing it would take more time than I felt like spending.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, weighing all things in the balance of reason? Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful? --Zachris Topelius
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It's even worse - this is talking about rockets and other space debris. To my memory no one has ever been hit by it. It's almost always hitting the Pacific or Indian oceans.
TTFN - Kent
It is very difficult to predict (or control) the crash point of a satellite, so they generally fall at random points along their orbital track. Unless there is a good reason to do otherwise, launches are preferably toward the East from as close to the equator as possible, into low-inclination orbits (close to the equatorial plane). This gives an extra boost to the rocket due to the Earth's rotation. Looking at an atlas, most of the area of the tropics is water - the Pacific and the Indian oceans. The exceptions are equatorial Africa and South America, neither of which are very heavily populated. Note that there was a nuclear-powered Soviet satellite ([Kosmos 954](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosmos\_954)) that crashed into Canada about 45 years ago. The Russians still owe money for the cleanup operation; good luck collecting...
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. -- 6079 Smith W.
-
It is very difficult to predict (or control) the crash point of a satellite, so they generally fall at random points along their orbital track. Unless there is a good reason to do otherwise, launches are preferably toward the East from as close to the equator as possible, into low-inclination orbits (close to the equatorial plane). This gives an extra boost to the rocket due to the Earth's rotation. Looking at an atlas, most of the area of the tropics is water - the Pacific and the Indian oceans. The exceptions are equatorial Africa and South America, neither of which are very heavily populated. Note that there was a nuclear-powered Soviet satellite ([Kosmos 954](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosmos\_954)) that crashed into Canada about 45 years ago. The Russians still owe money for the cleanup operation; good luck collecting...
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. -- 6079 Smith W.
And now for the longer post I didn't want to write earlier...
Daniel Pfeffer wrote:
It is very difficult to predict (or control) the crash point of a satellite, so they generally fall at random points along their orbital track.
Passive reentry is unpredictable since it's dominated by short term atmospheric density variations. To control where you come down you need to do an engine burn to reenter. All the capsules going to/from the space stations do so. Current best practices - I'm not sure if there's a treaty of any sort, or if it's just voluntary but encouraged at present - are to do the same for upper stages for launches to LEO. This is why the F9 second stage that broke after deploying it's payload and didn't re-enter was notable; as is the Long March 5B heavy lift rocket which takes it's far larger main center core all the way to orbit (the baseline model has a second stage on top and drops the center core like any other booster at suborbital speeds) and then by design leaves to re enter at random a few weeks later are catching so much flak. Currently no one does controlled deorbits of upper stages sending payloads into Geosynchronous Transfer Orbit. There're a number of reasons here; most come down to cost. A de-orbit burn from GTO takes a lot more fuel than one from LEO which means a significant reduction in payload capacity. It also requires the rocket to remain operational for an extra 6 hours (the reentry burn needs to happen when it's at apogee) requiring larger batteries and measures to keep the propellant lines from freezing. Other than ULA and SpaceX, I'm not sure if anyone else has demonstrated the capability. Those two companies have because the DOD wants some of their satellites carried all the way to GEO by the rocket itself so they're not hanging around in a transfer orbit for a few days to let other countries look at them with telescopes while close to the surface and easy to image. That's somewhat counterbalanced because IIRC rocket stages in GTO normally reenter via drag while still in eccentric orbits that mean they hit the air going faster and are more likely to fully burn up or at least have fewer and smaller pieces return intact. Edit: The fact that these stages aren't normally disposed of, and - because they spend only a short period of their orbit in the outer edges of the atmosphere taking drag forces - need years or decades to finally reenter is a large part of why if anything does make it down