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Comment by La1n | Hacker News Reader

To those saying it's cultural, or China is pushing this to be normal, or China needs to be sanctioned. Do you respond the same when SpaceX drops space junk to earth?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/ericmack/2021/04/04/spacex-rock...

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SpaceX usually deorbits their second stage rockets over the ocean in a controlled manner. The article you linked is about a one-off case where the rocket engine failed to re-light and ended up reentering in an uncontrolled manner.

There's a big difference between something like this happening due to an accident, and it being done on purpose as a matter of course.

Isn't the difference here that one was a deliberate design decision and one was a de-orbit burn failure? While the risks posed by both are significant (though the chinese rocket is much, much larger) there was no intent by SpaceX that this outcome was "good enough". That does not seem to be true here. They should probably both face sanctions, but the sanction for deliberate design choices should be much more severe than those for failures.

There is a meaningful difference between a failure to de-orbit properly as planned, and planning to not have a controlled de-orbit.

There seems to be a difference on how space junk is described based on who the source of the space junk is. e.g. see these headlines: https://imgur.com/a/FwzuMVK

Yes. High-speed space trash is high-speed space trash.

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