YNM

Correction : It would be a waste not to accelerate any part of the precious 48 hour window. Lunar free-return trajectory is already a 6 days round trip.

Seems like the same as with EUSST, just that the middle of the window is off Portugal, before the EUSST prediction (which is in Australia as it's 28 mins later so roughly 1/4 or 1/3 of the world away). EDIT : And just to spice things up, Aerospace Corp. 's prediction has their middle-of-reentry-window roughly 1 orbit after 18-SPCS/CSpOC 's middle-of-reentry-window prediction : EDIT 2 : Said 18-SPCS/CSpOC prediction plot : EDIT 3 : Also, from SatFlare, orbit is getting reeeally low :

Latest from 18-SPCS/CSpOC, narrowing it down to +- 1 hour (so 1.5 orbits) :

Takes 2000 km to a coast, then another 1500 km...

You're making on average 5 times as much too (purchasing power parity, nominally you're making 15 times more than us on average). Although I'm not just directing this to the US. Honestly I don't get why China even needs something similar, since they're willing to build so much more land-based infrastructure stuff anyway as well. Surely providing internet on the ground is an OK thing with them.

Tough luck.

What I was saying is that it's probably possible to properly do the cables even over the ground to withstand the forces they will be facing. Granted we have no strong winds and stray trees have brought down half the island's electricity once but it's not something you solve merely with tunneling - probably better design, construction and maintenance. Probably cheaper than tunneling, too. Also maybe do the cable works (if you still want them underground) with when they redo the road. We're only a backwater 3rd world country most of the time, but we have done things that barely means a jump to something satellite-based (apart from the remote islands but the gov't are looking over them very closely).

Have you heard about continents ?

... and I live on an island 1000 km long with 150 million inhabitants on it yet somehow we have a dozen active volcanoes on the same place and we still can go and visit a village and rice paddies. Also I'm pretty sure the US have spent a lot of money in the past making roads to nearly all that exist on their continent. Can't see why they can't replicate it with a cable or two.

If I'm being honest I don't get the need to bury everything these days either... Then again our housing complex are mostly wall-to-wall buildings so it doesn't look any much worse with cables on top of our heads.

Are the electric lines to your house buried or overground ? Ours used to be completely overground, only in recent times have the main 3-phase distribution moved underground (but the last 1-phase is on poles). The telephone lines and the internet lines just follows that.

EUSST narrowing down their prediction to 3 passes of the Earth : Australia is looking likely...

Maaaybe make the chance non-zero. Legislations, legislations...

It's commonly done these days - there are contractors specialized in tunneling for utilities and sewers. Or you don't even need tunnels. We already commonly run electricity as well as telephone cables on overhead lines hung from poles anyway, and those are as important as (if not more important than) the internet. I have fiber optic to my home, even the national telephone company uses optical cables everywhere these days. Granted the internet service that they provide is crap (so I actually have two fiber optic cable into my home, one from a different provider) but they already put out the infrastructure for it for free - when they updated it from copper cables that ends on an RJ-45 jack to optical that ends on an GPON/ONT device we didn't have to pay anything extra.

Airplanes at least have much more constrained routes - there's a good reason most crashes happened at terminal phases (takeoff/landing), and recently en-route crashes have been because they're too close to each other from the position precision following the routes. Satellites don't do this wrt the Earth's surface. Also the forces at launch can often mean it's very hard to launch large things with extremely high precision. We'll probably solve that by moving to manufacturing them in space but that's going to be in the decades and centuries to come after the internet constellations (and assuming we can still launch anything to space because there isn't a wreck of debris around the planet yet). SpaceX is indeed a lot more caring at least compared to the others in the market (or planning to be in the market) but the results of things are often determined on the lowest bar. Will say that I honestly don't get the drive for satellite-based internet however... Land-based (and undersea-based) connection is a lot more reliable IMO. The only drive here is because it's much easier (read : requires less maintenance and upfront cost) than anything land-based but it'll always be much more reliable with land-based connection. We have roads to most places on the Earth... why not a fiber optic cable or two ?

They went straight to the orbital phase. Initially the recovery method was going to be with parachutes, more in line with Shuttle SRBs or Electron's 1st stage, but that was abandoned. Then... you know the story how they managed to do things. First stage is completely suborbital so they started guiding the booster on re-entry, then over-the-sea hovering, over-barge hovering (then crashing on the barge), and then the first land back to the LZ. Also Grashopper. Starship testing is akin to try to land back the 2nd stage of F9 but the stage itself is much larger than three F9/FH 1st stages (or cores) combined. This is why it's a lot more risky.

Given the new Aerospace Corp. predictions might be Middle East instead (being in between all four predictions). 18-SPCS/CSpOC update next in 6 hrs. EDIT : As of 16:22 UTC, Satflare prediction's midpoint is before the Americas : Satflare continuously updates their main images however : Still a bit less chance for Australia, given the midpoint, probably extra for Middle East. EDIT 2 : Images. EDIT 3 (slow news version) : Reminder of what happened last time when a CZ-5B 1st stage re-entered : EDIT 4 : Celestrak visualization based on latest 18-SPCS/CSpOC TLE data (which should be updated maybe in 4 hrs) : Altitude is probably not very accurate since other trackers than 18-SPCS/CSpOC have reported perigee altitudes lower than 150 km.

Betting on a suborbital test first to the middle of the Atlantic, then I guess you can intentionally make the orbit of the first orbital test low enough so it's guaranteed to re-enter after certain number of orbits a la Atlas-Mercury or have the range-safety detonation available on orbit (so you can detonate it when you detect it's going to re-enter soon, avoiding large debris).

... Right, so Roscosmos was stating my place as the start of the predicted re-entry point. Midpoint still on the same orbit plane (ground track plane ?) as the EUSST prediction. If there're any Australians here, probably from Perth or Tasmania, you're having the highest chance of a jackpot I say... (EDIT 2) Aerospace Corp. has updated their predictions : EDIT : Space-Track has updated theirs as well :

So about May 9 07:30 UTC+8 / 06:30 UTC+7... Would be some bolide I guess... From CSpOC : EDIT : EUSST coming up with 02:11 UTC +- 190 mins :

Yeah from the prediction from Aerospace Corp. 8 hrs ago, my 'lucky' path would be the very last pass on the prediction. Should be weeded out soon I suppose, it's not on satflare or EUSST already.

Well, the orbit that passes close to my city is gone as well... Still some chance of it re-entering in the territory though ! EDIT : Although honestly that map's cutoff is not great.

4% more chance for everyone to receive their jackpot... Still a quarter of it, not that bad I suppose

They're not planning to close down the three inland launch sites however... it's still much harder to spot a launch pad among the mountains than something on the coastline.

Hold your horses, there is no air on the Moon XD Could we make rocket-powered tipjet rotor ? Fuel should be methalox... In the past people liked lead pipes and lead jars because the water tasted sweeter though...