Did Space Debris Hit A United Flight Over The Rockies Thursday?
16 comments
·October 19, 2025gortok
pxeger1
> folks still win the lottery, and you’re more likely to get struck by lightning than win the powerball jackpot
I'm more likely to get struck by lightning than win the lottery, sure. But it's much more likely that someone wins the lottery this week (~100% in fact) than that someone gets struck by lightning this week.
Edit: my point about independence of events still stands, but it turns out people get struck by lightning amazingly often. The chance of someone in the world getting struck by lightning this week seems to be about 99%!
010101010101
> it's much more likely that someone wins the lottery this week (~100% in fact) than that someone gets struck by lightning this week
No it isn’t? Not only are the individual odds of winning the lottery lower than the individual odds of being struck by lightning, but far more people are exposed to lightning on a weekly basis than participate in any given lottery.
rzzzt
Do lottery winners get struck by lightning?
CaptainOfCoit
> So what’s the risk of space debris to aviation? An FAA report from 2023 estimated an annual 0.1% chance that falling space debris would cause a single global aviation casualty. That meant individual passenger risk was less than a trillion‑to‑one though projected to increase.
I wonder if a report done in October 2025 would give a different estimate, considering we have a lot more stuff in space now compared to 2023.
mapmeld
An annual 0.1% chance of one casualty (so: a passenger jet less than 1 in 1,000 years) doesn't become significantly more likely in two years. Also I assume the FAA actuaries would have forward projections of Starlink launches.
Maybe this is space shuttle math where real-world accidents tell us that the risk is significantly higher. But it'd be the first documented case of a meteor or space debris, so I'd guess it's still unlikely.
Hilift
I sense an incoming report supporting the space hail theory.
dflock
Interesting! There are ~2 starlink satellites re-entering the atmosphere _every day_ now - and this is only set to increase. I wonder if this was caused by starlink debris?
imglorp
The starlink satellites are designed to burn up in the atmosphere. They do this pretty often. But there's plenty of other space junk that's not designed to burn up and should have shown up on radar.
CaptainOfCoit
And the Titanic was designed to not sink, sometimes reality is harsh. What is the probability for any of the parts of a starlink satallite to survive a descent?
potato3732842
Way less likely than the non-burned up remainder of some item from decades ago that was never specifically designed to burn up because "that's hard and it'll probably hit the ocean anyway"
It's hard to overstate just how much random junk is up there.
darthnebula
Boy, you just really wish you could blame this on Starlink.
Two events each having a low probability is not the same thing as the events not happening. Despite our best efforts, folks still win the lottery, and you’re more likely to get struck by lightning than win the powerball jackpot.
So while it can be extremely unlikely from a probability standpoint that this plane was stuck by space debris, and it can also be extremely unlikely that he saw it before it hit, it’s not a false statement just because the probability says it’s unlikely.
And of course, despite probability, folks still get struck by lightning.