Re:New Long March 5B Uncontrolled Reentry Tracked by Aerospa...
by ch4s3 on Sunday November 06, 2022 @11:40AM
(#33494392)
It's just a known issue that could be trivially avoided in the design phase. Even building for controlled reentry could have allowed them to accurately dump it in the ocean 100% of the time. It just super dick-ish to not do that and lie about every time you launch. The lie that the whole thing burns up on reentry is also super shitty and indefensible when these huge hunks of metal are trivially tracked by scientists and governments world wide.
The area of the earth’s surface occupied by humans (not their stuff, but the people themselves) is around 8000 km^2 (1m^2 per person) out of a total Earth surface area of 510 million km^2. so the probability is around 1.6E-5 or 0.0016% per launch. This obviously doesn’t account for the specific trajectory or population distribution, but gives us a rough order of magnitude.
I would prefer they didn’t do it also, and it definitely loses them international good will - but it’s a pretty low (but non-zero) risk.
[typo corrected]