That's not great, especially since SpaceX apparently expected the component to burn up in the atmosphere. Given there are thousands of them up there, and all must re-enter over the next decade or so, that's a lot of potential debris impacts on the ground.
danielvf 10 hours ago [-]
Note that this was from a failed launch - this debris was not from old starlink satellites falling out of operating orbits.
perihelions 10 hours ago [-]
These satellites deorbit into oceans, not land, if they're functioning.
- "On August 20, 2024, a 2.5 kg piece of aluminum was found on the ground in a farm in Saskatchewan, Canada, and determined by SpaceX engineers to have come from a Starlink satellite that reentered following the erroneous Falcon G9-3 deploy. The debris was traced by SpaceX engineers to a specific satellite and part – a modem enclosure lid of the backhaul antenna on a Starlink direct-to-cell satellite. This part was predicted to fully demise by both the NASA and ESA tools and is the only known Starlink fragment to have not done so."
cz_the_lee 6 hours ago [-]
This is only one of many reported - there's Canadian news coverage from earlier last year that SpaceX conveniently left out of their own report
Oh wow, that's isn't a small piece. That's crazy big. Very dangerous.
oaiey 12 hours ago [-]
Am I the only one who think: "Canadian government officials joking about that 'Musk is throwing now satellites at them'".
markus_zhang 10 hours ago [-]
Orbital bombardment!
Havoc 11 hours ago [-]
Canadians catching all sorts of strays these days
josefritzishere 8 hours ago [-]
Littering. That's a $250 fine
moralestapia 11 hours ago [-]
They should get some sort of compensation, even if no one was injured.
RandomBacon 10 hours ago [-]
I should get some sort of compensation for seeing your comment – it caused pixels on my computer to change, even if it didn't hurt me.
On a more serious note, maybe if their courts allowed for the property owner to sue SpaceX for littering? Otherwise the actual damage is deminimis and courts generally don't allow compensation for "what-if"s.
moralestapia 10 hours ago [-]
I know you ... can't do better than this.
But ... private land is protected by the law while your HP Pavillion browsing the web is not. That's part of its intended use.
theoreticalmal 11 hours ago [-]
They did. Aluminum has good scrap value these days.
10 hours ago [-]
Rendered at 23:53:47 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Primary source linked therein,
(.pdf) https://www.starlink.com/public-files/Starlink_Approach_to_S... ("Starlink Approach to Satellite Demisability")
- "On August 20, 2024, a 2.5 kg piece of aluminum was found on the ground in a farm in Saskatchewan, Canada, and determined by SpaceX engineers to have come from a Starlink satellite that reentered following the erroneous Falcon G9-3 deploy. The debris was traced by SpaceX engineers to a specific satellite and part – a modem enclosure lid of the backhaul antenna on a Starlink direct-to-cell satellite. This part was predicted to fully demise by both the NASA and ESA tools and is the only known Starlink fragment to have not done so."
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatoon/cp-space-junk-more-...
Same story featured in Scientific American: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/spacex-dropped-sp...
On a more serious note, maybe if their courts allowed for the property owner to sue SpaceX for littering? Otherwise the actual damage is deminimis and courts generally don't allow compensation for "what-if"s.
But ... private land is protected by the law while your HP Pavillion browsing the web is not. That's part of its intended use.