I liked how they managed to somehow make it seem like Russia's fault.
> "You can trace the reason this object came down unguided back to a Russian launch failure more than five years ago"
I'm sure that when making their carefully choreographed schedule NASA was well aware that at some point a rocket might not make it and that they'd have to deal with it (or not) if/when that happened. NASA made the choice to leave the batteries up there, then decided not to send something up to bring them back and just drop them uncontrolled instead.
> "It gets more interesting if this material is discovered to be not originally from the United States," she told Ars. "If it is a human-made space object which was launched into space by another country, which caused damage on Earth, that country would be absolutely liable to the homeowner for the damage caused."
I hope that if the thing that fell was from the ISS that NASA compensates the home owner right away instead of waiting to figure out if japan made the piece that fell and leaving the homeowner to figure out how to send Japan the bill and collect.
It's an interesting piece of projectile in that case though. You could throw it into the windshield of a NASA administrator and they couldn't sue you for the damage, they'd have to send the bill to whichever country made the thing.
> If the object is owned by NASA, Otero or his insurance company could make a claim against the federal government under the Federal Tort Claims Act, according to Michelle Hanlon, executive director of the Center for Air and Space Law at the University of Mississippi.
Reasonable & decent gov't behavior: Promptly determine whether the object is from space, and pay the homeowner 2X the cost of his repairs if "yes". "Fault" aside, the scientific and/or intel value of it would be considerably higher than the payment.
Estimated chance of our gov't behaving in a reasonable and decent manner: 0%
Is it possible to actually aim a pallet of trash to a specific area? I assume it will break up into pieces on reentry with each piece being made of different materials and having a different profile, falling to different spots. I wonder how accurate something like this could reasonably be done.
> It is notoriously difficult to predict where a piece of space junk will reenter the atmosphere. US Space Command precisely tracks tens of thousands of objects in Earth orbit, but the exact density of the upper atmosphere is still largely an unknown variable. Even a half-day before the reentry, US Space Command's estimate for when the battery pallet would fall to Earth had a window of uncertainty spanning six hours, enough time for the object to circle the planet four times.
Basically, if you're getting shipments (I understand this situation was caused by a lack of a shipment/rocket), and you might need to dump stuff, you'd send some "disposal rocket".
But I get it, until Starship changes the game, every kilogram is precious.
As for people discussing breakup uncertainty or inability to target the Pacific, I mean, the pacific ocean is 12,000 miles wide. I get that reentry isn't a perfect parabola/piece of cake with all the sci-fi hooks about "bouncing off the atmosphere".
Anyway, they "jettisoned" it, which to me implies some sort of delta-v, some awareness of its vector/orbit, etc.
They did not have the pallet removed in time to put it on the departing JAXA HTV cargo spacecraft, which has some control over where it burns up. It would not fit on any craft operated by NASA. (I haven't checked if it would fit into a cygnus, but I doubt it)
"Jettisoning" things from the ISS is actually pretty straightforward, you just drop or throw it out the back (aft) and its orbit should decay faster than your spacecraft. (IIRC, you really don't want to throw it straight down) JAXA has an airlock that takes great advantage of this for launching cubesats.
> "You can trace the reason this object came down unguided back to a Russian launch failure more than five years ago"
I'm sure that when making their carefully choreographed schedule NASA was well aware that at some point a rocket might not make it and that they'd have to deal with it (or not) if/when that happened. NASA made the choice to leave the batteries up there, then decided not to send something up to bring them back and just drop them uncontrolled instead.
> "It gets more interesting if this material is discovered to be not originally from the United States," she told Ars. "If it is a human-made space object which was launched into space by another country, which caused damage on Earth, that country would be absolutely liable to the homeowner for the damage caused."
I hope that if the thing that fell was from the ISS that NASA compensates the home owner right away instead of waiting to figure out if japan made the piece that fell and leaving the homeowner to figure out how to send Japan the bill and collect.