Qantas South Africa flights delayed by falling debris from SpaceX rockets
71 comments
·January 15, 2025kylehotchkiss
mrpippy
I don't think there are diversion points, you either keep going to destination or turn around. The A380 is rated for ETOPS-330, that's 5hr30min from a diversion airport.
bangaladore
Incase anyone is wondering about ETOPS-N
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.
chippiewill
I believe it's not just that it is able to fly with 1 engine. It's that the probability of a secondary engine failure in that time is below a certain threshold. Most twin engine planes can fly perfectly fine for basically any distance with an engine out, ETOPs provides confidence that the other one won't fail too.
nickff
It is my understanding (from a no-longer-available) MIT OCW aircraft systems design video that these requirements are based on one engine failure on the aircraft, regardless of the number of engines on the aircraft.
m4rtink
A380 has 4 engines, so maybe it doees this with more than one ?
tonyhart7
does aircraft only operate engine as minimal as possible to save fuel or they burn more if they use fewer engine to having engine work extra because of its weight ?
kylehotchkiss
It's incredible a 14 hour flight can run with that level of certainty!
duxup
I can't imagine that much ... nothing out there.
echelon_musk
> shrill
I suspect you may have meant to say shill instead.
gosub100
I used to geek out on this, another one from pre-covid was Santiago Chile to Sydney AUS, 2-3x a week. That looked like one _lonely_ flight.
bmitc
Why is that anyone else's problem besides SpaceX's? Are they going to pay for it?
_bin_
Why would Qantas have the implicit right to the airspace first? Space travel and air travel are both value-added human activities. I can't see why we would always prioritize air travel (particularly in very remote locations like this) over space travel.
Most flights will never be impacted this way.
rising-sky
You're kidding right? This is space debris. If a Qantas flight crashed into your neighborhood, you know who's responsible right?
axus
A flight is using a very narrow path, the rocket debris is "claiming" a huge unavoidable areas over probably a relatively long period of time.
I wonder what the math is on the plane actually getting hit if it took it's normal route.
timewizard
> flights humanity operates
Humanity does not operate flights. This isn't some world wide effort to ensure that people can fly from South Africa to Australia. It's merely profitable for a single company to offer this service. The plane has 4 engines and more redundancy than you can shake a stick at.
> minimal damage to ecosystems.
That's an incredibly cavalier attitude to allow any for profit company to utilize. Is this for the benefit of humanity? Do we all get a profit sharing check at some point?
wat10000
That really downplays the amount of collaboration needed to make a flight like this happen. The airplane was designed and built by tons of people in lots of different counties, building on a century of aviation industry knowledge. The amount of work and experience that goes into making a machine that can safely be 5+ hours from a landing site is enormous.
exabrial
This is comically common, but because it has SpaceX in the name, it makes headlines.
Kon-Peki
> This is comically common, but because it has SpaceX in the name, it makes headlines.
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.
boringg
I agree - it is quite funny that it is getting attention. It's like a combination of Elon being on X and getting attention and SEO creating some infinite loop of everything revolving around him. Please stop.
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.
perihelions
Well, some of their chief competitors (i.e. Ariane 5) don't even do a controlled re-entry of their upper stages, so they don't issue warnings at all. They reenter anywhere on the planet at an unannounced random time and place. In a sense SpaceX is a victim of its own success here.
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).
lupusreal
Their biggest competitor is China, who likes to drop their boosters on Chinese villages. Understandably, the villagers don't complain about this too loudly.
ryan_j_naughton
Context?
baq
SpaceX is also like 99% of all launches, so…
throitallaway
And with that the total number of rocket flights per year has ramped up due to SpaceX. Same thing applies to Starlink satellites "ruining" the night sky. It was a bit of an issue before, but now that there are thousands of satellites up there from one company, they're making headlines for similar reasons.
jclarkcom
I saw them a couple of nights ago and was able to get them in a photo. You can see about 12 of them in a row.
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/u978rksgjrtvusfmpt36k/IMG_896...
sapphicsnail
I've talked to people that live in dark areas and they've never seen anything like the Starlink satellites before. People are definitely after Elon but he really brought that on himself.
echoangle
More like 50%. In 2024, they had 134 launches and globally, there were 259.
atonse
And they've made sure to add "Elon Musk's SpaceX" either for extra SEO, or who-knows-what.
rising-sky
Looks like it worked? Smart strategy
whycome
I thought you were kidding.
> 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.
meta_x_ai
This is a hate Elon Musk story with whatever little thing that they can find from left-wing propaganda aka "The Guardian".
The only long-term effect is it exacerbates Elon Derangement Syndrome among some of the smart / educated crowd effectively crippling their judgement on everything where they don't even know why they made an irrational decision except sub-consciously they hate Trump/Elon/Kavanuagh/Hegeseth/Zuck because the media they consume told them to do so.
Yes, I have personally seen smart people taking dumb sides/decision because of the above syndrome
somethoughts
Amusingly I think it's great that Elon had a very public divorce with Silicon Valley. Otherwise I could easily see this having been titled "Qantas South Africa flights delayed by falling debris from Silicon Valley based SpaceX rocket" for maximum clicks.
yokem55
The solution here is for Spacex to tighten up their planned reentry corridors. At this point they should have more than enough experience in their ops to narrow down the likely debris field to a narrow strip that can be easily flown around instead of the huge swath of Indian Ocean they'd been allowing for.
sbuttgereit
[delayed]
russdill
It's for the starship test flights. Given the nature of the program, the areas are currently "large":
zardo
Don't they typically dispose of falcon 9 second stages over the Indian Ocean? That would be happening much more often than test flights.
bryanlarsen
Second stage and satellite disposal target is typically Point Nemo in the Pacific Ocean, 2688 kilometers away from the Pitcairn Islands, Easter Islands and Antarctica.
Nobody is flying or sailing at Point Nemo.
echoangle
Those probably already have the tight reentry corridor the parent comment requests
modeless
The solution here is for them to nail landings. This is a temporary problem during testing. Hopefully there will only be one or two more launches that reenter over the Indian Ocean before they start landing the ship at the launch pad instead.
_bin_
They will be tightening them as the starship program continues. It's just still in a testing stage right now.
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)
lupusreal
Their last few rentries have been extremely tight, doing simulated landings on the water right next to a prepositioned camera buoy. The position of the buoy is almost certainly less precise than the rocket itself.
blackholesRhot
This is only for Starship testing. The issue should go away very soon, after at most a few more Starship tests.
Zealotux
In such cases: would airlines be entitled to compensation from the companies blocking their operations? Or do they just have to deal with it?
ghxst
Is it typical that anyone gets compensated for a temporary road closure? From what I understand this is one of the safest areas for space debris to re-enter, so likely it's justified and just part of having both spaceflight and aviation industries.
JoeAltmaier
Sounds like tracking would help. If the re-entry is controlled, why not broadcast transponder info from the reentering parts so they appear on airplane displays? Then they can adjust course, just as they do any other aircraft in their flight path.
russdill
The south indian ocean is the re-entry site for the 2nd stage of their next starship flight test, which will (should) re-enter in one piece so the risk of falling debris is certainly not trivial and unfortunately the size of the hazard region is also not trivial.
They've rescheduled a few times now and each time operators flying in this region have to shuffle things around.
phkahler
They're also going to deploy several fake starlink sats which will re-enter in the same area but with no control AFICT so those will cover more area.
BurningFrog
Are they maybe small enough to disintegrate before reaching human altitudes?
bagels
Plasmas are going to block the signals for at least some of the phases.
wkat4242
Yes and also, these parts are not made for pristine reentry, it's very likely they'll split up in different parts. How do you make sure every part has a transponder and it doesn't burn up?
DiggyJohnson
Last launch had no blackout period, why would this one?
bpodgursky
The odds of damage are essentially 0 even if there was no diversion. The background risk of a plane crashing with mechanical failures may dwarf this risk.
It's hard to emphasize how comically vast the region described is. Its like... shooting two marbles across Manhattan and colliding.
Axsuul
How is this debris tracked – NORAD?
blackholesRhot
This is only for Starship testing and should go away as an issue after a few more Starship tests.
https://www.flightaware.com/live/flight/QFA63/history/202501...
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.