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.
"In 1998, Bill Morgan, an Australian man from Melbourne was captured on film winning a AU$250,000 scratchcard while re-enacting his previous scratchcard win for a news report. The video of the event has since been widely shared online."
Wow, what a story. Especially with the background what happened to him before winning twice.
"Morgan, a 37-year-old truck driver living in a caravan, was almost killed in a car crash which caused him to develop a heart condition. He then suffered an allergic reaction to the drug used to treat this condition, which triggered a fatal heart attack. He was declared clinically dead for 14 minutes and 38 seconds before being revived by paramedics. He subsequently lapsed into a coma for 12 days, during which his family were advised to turn off his life support. After being transferred to a different hospital, he woke up and made a full recovery."
That article could use some work. In the second paragraph after the one that quote is from it says:
> His dramatic change in fortune attracted local media attention, and two weeks after his first scratchcard win in May 1999, Nine News asked him to re-enact it for the B-roll footage of their news report. While being filmed scratching off another card inside the shop, he turned around, held up the ticket and said, "I just won 250,000. I'm not joking. I just won 250,000."
1998 was when he suffered a car crash followed by serious medical problems.
> 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%!
> 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.
You can buy thousands of lottery tickets and it won't meaningfully impact your odds of winning though. You can also go stand outside in a field with a metal rod in your hand during a thunderstorm. "You" isn't really the point, it's the cumulative probabilities that matter. For lotteries this is easy to calculate, for lightning strikes the best you can do is probably looking at past statistics.
Right, but the population of people who buy lottery tickets often do buy more than one lottery ticket, so even if the number of people buying lottery tickets divided by the per ticket chance to win is smaller than the number of people divided by the chance of being hit by lightning, the overall chance of anyone winning the lottery can be higher than the overall chance of anyone getting hit by lightning for the same period.
That’s not true either though - someone eventually always wins the lottery, someone eventually always gets struck by lightning. The latter usually happens before the former.
When a lottery happens, there is always a winner, that's how they work. When there is a lightning, it doesn't always strike a human. The former is (almost) guaranteed to happen, barring something out of the ordinary, while the latter usually doesn't happen, but does happen sometimes.
> When a lottery happens, there is always a winner, that's how they work.
It's possible this is a language and cultural thing, but most (possibly all?) state run lotteries in the United States don't work this way - they simply pick numbers from a pool at random and if no one has selected those exact numbers the prize pool rolls over to the next week. Powerball (afaik the largest US based lottery) works by selecting 5 numbers from a pool of 1-69, and one number from a pool of 1-26, if no one matches all six numbers then the primary prize pool carries into the next drawing. There's no guarantee anyone wins the jackpot on any given week, and often multiple weeks and sometimes months will pass with no winner, ballooning the jackpot further.
I'd more often refer to what you're saying as a "drawing" or a "sweepstakes" where tickets are sold and the winning ticket is selected from the pool of all tickets sold, but that's distinctly different to a "lottery" for me.
> 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.
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.
> 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
Well, not by itself, but isn't that risk based on how many numbers of objects there are in space? And since we're launching more stuff into space than falls out of it, the numbers used for the calculations may be changing?
When TWA Flight 800 went down over Long Island in 1996, there were at the time multiple witness statements of a "streak of light" which had been reported (and later discounted by the investigation) as a possible missile.
Although the odds are incredibly slim, I wondered around the time if it could have actually been a meteorite striking the aircraft, passing through the fuel tank and causing the explosion. Presumably it would have been moving very quickly, might have looked like a missile to an observer, and wouldn't have left any shrapnel debris/marks in the wreckage.
I would imagine that the space debris mentioned in the article would be a lot less dense and moving much more slowly (relatively speaking) than a meteorite at the impact with the aircraft.
I have a paralyzing phobia of flying. I do, but It's always many hours of sheer terror. In my paranoia, I recently unlocked a new concern about air travel: what if a meteorite hits the plane? That would certainly be catastrophic. And now I've acquired a new one, space debris! Nice.
You could get hit by a meteorite walking down the street, taking a train, or driving a car too.
There's some degree of things we just can't do anything about. We just have to accept it and move on. There's something about the human condition that makes it easy to say, and hard to do, and harder for some people than others - wishing you luck on your journey.
Focus on what you can control (exercise is a miracle drug that will lower your risk of so many problems! Don't smoke! Use sunscreen!) and enjoy life as best you can.
"Something from “space” may have just struck a United Airlines flight over Utah" "“NTSB gathering radar, weather, flight recorder data.”": https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/10/something-from-space-m... (arstechnica.com/space/2025/10/something-from-space-may-have-just-struck-a-united-airlines-flight-over-utah/)
Captain's arm was injured by debris, but no decompression? How did they get past the windshield? Also, those scratchs look days old. Not a drop of blood visible.
To me, the scratches could be new or a couple of hours old. They look like superficial scratches and cuts, they can heal quickly when the person is healthy.
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?
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.
1) if this was big enough to get picked up on a 737 radar I think we would be having a very different conversation...
2) even if it did... rentry velocity is like miles per second, that would give you on the order of single digit seconds to recognize something on an intersecting trajectory and take action...
3) even then, I would bet that an object on this trajectory and speed would get filtered out as noise by aircraft radar because it is so antithetical to the types of things an airliner needs to inform pilots of.
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?
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.
I was excited to see some evidence, but if you actually read the article they're talking about flakes of silicon with less than one joule of energy reaching the surface. To break an airliner windscreen, you need an energy more like a big hammer.
> In one rare instance, the company also revealed that "a 2.5 kg piece of aluminum" found on farm grounds in Saskatchewan, Canada, was traced to a Starlink satellite.
A piece of debris of similar size to this is what I'd guess could cause the kind of damage we see in the incident involving the airliner.
So while most Starlink debris may be harmless by the time it reaches the surface, we know this doesn't always happen as expected.
And since the vast majority of reentering space debris is from Starlink satellites, that'd would be the first place I'd look.
To be totally clear, I am doubtful this is actually caused by space debris, but I don't think it's entirely unreasonable for it to be one of the most likely causes.
> The starlink satellites are designed to burn up in the atmosphere.
How high in the atmosphere, though? They're not likely to hit the ground, sure, but 36,000 feet isn't the ground. Second, designs fail. 432 Park was designed not to have cracking and spalling concrete, yet NYT has a story today about exactly those things. Third, people lie about designs and capabilities. Pretty sure anyone who has ever worked in computing (especially with VC involved) has seen that. Who made that claim, and did they ever back it up?
I'm not saying that Starlink is the culprit here. The evidence is thin. OTOH the possibility can't just be dismissed because of a claim about a design to prevent a similar (but not identical) thing.
I pressume its much easier to design something to burn than to do anything else. You are basically just restricting yourself on material selection. The goal isnt for something to not fail, the goal is to fail. Its like asking to build a lawnmower that doesnt have to cut grass, and can look however you want. If you produce a pebble, it fits those criteria.
The atmospheric entrance for these (starlink) sattelites is basically as shallow as possible, so the object spends the most time possible in high atmosphere (think 60-90 km, where the atmo is thick enough to engulf the object in plasma, yet extert low pressure to slow it down, prolonging the time its burning. In otherwords, you couldnt achieve better parameters to burn stuff on deorbit.
All of it will probably be fully burned way before 50km - planes fly at 8-12
"Probably"? Even in their defense you felt a need to hedge, and that should tell you something. As another commenter has pointed out, Starlink has admitted that some components might survive re-entry. Let's not fall all over ourselves trying to give Musk and Co. more benefit of the doubt than they even give themselves.
Im just a rando on the internet, Ive never inspected the sats to know if they are not using materials that just wont burn up, hence "probably".
Im just listing facts to help you make a picture, I am not trying to "defend" anyone/anything. Please try to free your political/corporate bias from ingesting new information.
I haven't read the latest version of their ODAR (orbital debris assessment), but earlier versions of the satellites had a couple pounds of material that wasn't expected to burn up
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.
> folks still win the lottery
Yep, and:
"In 1998, Bill Morgan, an Australian man from Melbourne was captured on film winning a AU$250,000 scratchcard while re-enacting his previous scratchcard win for a news report. The video of the event has since been widely shared online."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Morgan_lottery_win
Wow, what a story. Especially with the background what happened to him before winning twice.
"Morgan, a 37-year-old truck driver living in a caravan, was almost killed in a car crash which caused him to develop a heart condition. He then suffered an allergic reaction to the drug used to treat this condition, which triggered a fatal heart attack. He was declared clinically dead for 14 minutes and 38 seconds before being revived by paramedics. He subsequently lapsed into a coma for 12 days, during which his family were advised to turn off his life support. After being transferred to a different hospital, he woke up and made a full recovery."
He is living some combination of Final Destination and Lost.
Or someone at the hospital wanted him dead.
I believe the movie you’re looking for is Coma
That article could use some work. In the second paragraph after the one that quote is from it says:
> His dramatic change in fortune attracted local media attention, and two weeks after his first scratchcard win in May 1999, Nine News asked him to re-enact it for the B-roll footage of their news report. While being filmed scratching off another card inside the shop, he turned around, held up the ticket and said, "I just won 250,000. I'm not joking. I just won 250,000."
1998 was when he suffered a car crash followed by serious medical problems.
> 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%!
> 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.
You can buy more than one lottery ticket. You can't buy more than one per-person chance of getting struck by lightning over a period.
You can buy thousands of lottery tickets and it won't meaningfully impact your odds of winning though. You can also go stand outside in a field with a metal rod in your hand during a thunderstorm. "You" isn't really the point, it's the cumulative probabilities that matter. For lotteries this is easy to calculate, for lightning strikes the best you can do is probably looking at past statistics.
Right, but the population of people who buy lottery tickets often do buy more than one lottery ticket, so even if the number of people buying lottery tickets divided by the per ticket chance to win is smaller than the number of people divided by the chance of being hit by lightning, the overall chance of anyone winning the lottery can be higher than the overall chance of anyone getting hit by lightning for the same period.
(This is why golf courses have storm sirens, incidentally.)
Lets reframe it: Someone always win the lottery, lighting doesn't always strike a human.
That’s not true either though - someone eventually always wins the lottery, someone eventually always gets struck by lightning. The latter usually happens before the former.
When a lottery happens, there is always a winner, that's how they work. When there is a lightning, it doesn't always strike a human. The former is (almost) guaranteed to happen, barring something out of the ordinary, while the latter usually doesn't happen, but does happen sometimes.
> When a lottery happens, there is always a winner, that's how they work.
It's possible this is a language and cultural thing, but most (possibly all?) state run lotteries in the United States don't work this way - they simply pick numbers from a pool at random and if no one has selected those exact numbers the prize pool rolls over to the next week. Powerball (afaik the largest US based lottery) works by selecting 5 numbers from a pool of 1-69, and one number from a pool of 1-26, if no one matches all six numbers then the primary prize pool carries into the next drawing. There's no guarantee anyone wins the jackpot on any given week, and often multiple weeks and sometimes months will pass with no winner, ballooning the jackpot further.
I'd more often refer to what you're saying as a "drawing" or a "sweepstakes" where tickets are sold and the winning ticket is selected from the pool of all tickets sold, but that's distinctly different to a "lottery" for me.
Do lottery winners get struck by lightning?
At least once:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/abcnews.go.com/amp/Internationa...
It sounds like some deity of fortune frantically balancing the books before an audit.
Apparently yes: https://abcnews.go.com/International/canadian-mans-lottery-w...
Appreciate the non-AMP link.
[dead]
> 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.
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.
> 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
Well, not by itself, but isn't that risk based on how many numbers of objects there are in space? And since we're launching more stuff into space than falls out of it, the numbers used for the calculations may be changing?
I sense an incoming report supporting the space hail theory.
More info here
https://viewfromthewing.com/united-captain-says-his-plane-wa...
When TWA Flight 800 went down over Long Island in 1996, there were at the time multiple witness statements of a "streak of light" which had been reported (and later discounted by the investigation) as a possible missile.
Although the odds are incredibly slim, I wondered around the time if it could have actually been a meteorite striking the aircraft, passing through the fuel tank and causing the explosion. Presumably it would have been moving very quickly, might have looked like a missile to an observer, and wouldn't have left any shrapnel debris/marks in the wreckage.
I would imagine that the space debris mentioned in the article would be a lot less dense and moving much more slowly (relatively speaking) than a meteorite at the impact with the aircraft.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TWA_Flight_800
I have a paralyzing phobia of flying. I do, but It's always many hours of sheer terror. In my paranoia, I recently unlocked a new concern about air travel: what if a meteorite hits the plane? That would certainly be catastrophic. And now I've acquired a new one, space debris! Nice.
I think this shows a hit by a small meteorite or space shrapnel is well survivable. It might even be a thought that can help you cope.
You could get hit by a meteorite walking down the street, taking a train, or driving a car too.
There's some degree of things we just can't do anything about. We just have to accept it and move on. There's something about the human condition that makes it easy to say, and hard to do, and harder for some people than others - wishing you luck on your journey.
Focus on what you can control (exercise is a miracle drug that will lower your risk of so many problems! Don't smoke! Use sunscreen!) and enjoy life as best you can.
I know you're trying to help, but genuine phobias don't typically yield to rational deconstruction.
You could get hit by a meteorite or space debris without flying too.
Not sure if this helps though...
Well, this is the first time this has happened in all aviation history, and nobody died.
"Something from “space” may have just struck a United Airlines flight over Utah" "“NTSB gathering radar, weather, flight recorder data.”": https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/10/something-from-space-m... (arstechnica.com/space/2025/10/something-from-space-may-have-just-struck-a-united-airlines-flight-over-utah/)
Captain's arm was injured by debris, but no decompression? How did they get past the windshield? Also, those scratchs look days old. Not a drop of blood visible.
Smells like fake news.
For a potential pilot (username), you are jumping to odd conclusions here...
* This looks relatively convincing.
https://avherald.com/h?article=52e80701
https://x.com/oeingoboeing/status/1979588783982133360
* They obviously would have cleaned up the wounds... this can be a few hours old , surface wounds build crusts quickly
To me, the scratches could be new or a couple of hours old. They look like superficial scratches and cuts, they can heal quickly when the person is healthy.
I am more concerned with the way the left window is held on using a big paperclip
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?
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.
1) if this was big enough to get picked up on a 737 radar I think we would be having a very different conversation...
2) even if it did... rentry velocity is like miles per second, that would give you on the order of single digit seconds to recognize something on an intersecting trajectory and take action...
3) even then, I would bet that an object on this trajectory and speed would get filtered out as noise by aircraft radar because it is so antithetical to the types of things an airliner needs to inform pilots of.
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?
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.
Boy, you just really wish you could blame this on Starlink.
cool yeah neat but you can contend with the reality that it does happen right? https://www.pcmag.com/news/spacex-actually-dying-starlink-sa...
I was excited to see some evidence, but if you actually read the article they're talking about flakes of silicon with less than one joule of energy reaching the surface. To break an airliner windscreen, you need an energy more like a big hammer.
From the article:
> In one rare instance, the company also revealed that "a 2.5 kg piece of aluminum" found on farm grounds in Saskatchewan, Canada, was traced to a Starlink satellite.
A piece of debris of similar size to this is what I'd guess could cause the kind of damage we see in the incident involving the airliner.
So while most Starlink debris may be harmless by the time it reaches the surface, we know this doesn't always happen as expected.
And since the vast majority of reentering space debris is from Starlink satellites, that'd would be the first place I'd look.
To be totally clear, I am doubtful this is actually caused by space debris, but I don't think it's entirely unreasonable for it to be one of the most likely causes.
> The starlink satellites are designed to burn up in the atmosphere.
How high in the atmosphere, though? They're not likely to hit the ground, sure, but 36,000 feet isn't the ground. Second, designs fail. 432 Park was designed not to have cracking and spalling concrete, yet NYT has a story today about exactly those things. Third, people lie about designs and capabilities. Pretty sure anyone who has ever worked in computing (especially with VC involved) has seen that. Who made that claim, and did they ever back it up?
I'm not saying that Starlink is the culprit here. The evidence is thin. OTOH the possibility can't just be dismissed because of a claim about a design to prevent a similar (but not identical) thing.
I pressume its much easier to design something to burn than to do anything else. You are basically just restricting yourself on material selection. The goal isnt for something to not fail, the goal is to fail. Its like asking to build a lawnmower that doesnt have to cut grass, and can look however you want. If you produce a pebble, it fits those criteria.
The atmospheric entrance for these (starlink) sattelites is basically as shallow as possible, so the object spends the most time possible in high atmosphere (think 60-90 km, where the atmo is thick enough to engulf the object in plasma, yet extert low pressure to slow it down, prolonging the time its burning. In otherwords, you couldnt achieve better parameters to burn stuff on deorbit.
All of it will probably be fully burned way before 50km - planes fly at 8-12
"Probably"? Even in their defense you felt a need to hedge, and that should tell you something. As another commenter has pointed out, Starlink has admitted that some components might survive re-entry. Let's not fall all over ourselves trying to give Musk and Co. more benefit of the doubt than they even give themselves.
Im just a rando on the internet, Ive never inspected the sats to know if they are not using materials that just wont burn up, hence "probably".
Im just listing facts to help you make a picture, I am not trying to "defend" anyone/anything. Please try to free your political/corporate bias from ingesting new information.
Are they designed to be completely burned up by the time they reach 38,000 feet above the ground?
I haven't read the latest version of their ODAR (orbital debris assessment), but earlier versions of the satellites had a couple pounds of material that wasn't expected to burn up
Why divert to SLC from there? Looks like Las Vegas was at least as close.
Would the elevation of the airport matter (for air pressure on that cracked windshield)? Did they pick SLC because it's higher?