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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

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In practice there's no such thing as a completely stable orbit - we spend like 3 tons a year of propelllant reboosting the International Space Station, and if we ever stopped its orbit would just keep decaying, faster and faster, until it reentered the atmosphere a year and a half or so later.

But you want to release satellites either into their final orbit (which you want to be stable for years or decades) or into an initial "parking" orbit they can gradually raise themselves (so you want it to even initially be stable for weeks or months). So the upper stage of a spacecraft will enter this mostly-stable orbit to release its satellites. From there, ideally you do a deorbit burn to control where you reenter, but either way you tend to have a small light aluminum upper stage that just burns up on reentry.

All the Starship tests have targeted "suborbital, but just barely" orbits like the one in test 10, aimed to reenter the atmosphere over the Indian Ocean without any further maneuvering. From a performance perspective there's not much difference between this and a full orbit, but from a safety perspective the difference is huge, because the Starship is huge.

If they're on a suborbital trajectory that's going to hit atmosphere over the middle of nowhere, then at that point even if the vehicle isn't controllable (which happened on the 3rd and 9th tests) or the engines can't relight in space (which hasn't happened, but they've only tested that twice now) it's still not a danger - even if it can't reenter safely, it'll still break up where nobody can be hurt. If they're on an orbital trajectory, they're not an immediate danger to anybody, but there's no such thing as a completely stable orbit, and the instability of an orbit depends on "space weather" that expands and contracts the upper atmosphere somewhat unpredictably, and so basically anywhere with a latitude as close to the equator as Boca Chica or closer would become a possible target.

China has at least one large rocket stage that basically plays Russian Roulette this way, but an untargeted Starship reentry would be even worse - the Long March 5B stage has at least been designed to use lighter materials that won't survive reentry very well, but Starship is steel and heat shield tiles designed for just the opposite, and it's 100 tons of them instead of 20. So they're not going to even try to get into orbit until they're very confident they can get out of it again.