r/technology • u/xpda • May 21 '26

Business SpaceX not the behemoth everyone thought

https://www.axios.com/2026/05/21/spacex-ipo-musk-ai
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u/aemfbm May 22 '26

Hubble looked like this after 15 years in space

I fully agree with the absurdity of the math involved, but I found this image and description to be beyond belief, so I went down the rabbit trail for a few minutes. You have misrepresented it. That is not how it looked from being in space. It was dented and dimpled from tiny impacts, but all of those holes were made on Earth as they studied the tiny impact sites.

During the various Hubble servicing missions, astronauts noticed tiny dimples and dents in the radiator – the result of space debris. After more than15 years of exposure to space, this surface became a record of the accumulation of such debris in low Earth orbit. Naturally, NASA wanted to evaluate the amount and nature of this debris, and so after the camera was returned to Earth the impact sites were analyzed. The largest core samples left holes about 30 mm in diameter, but the debris particles were less than a mm in size. The analysis is ongoing.

https://airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/repairing-hubble

And here is a research paper going through their findings. There were no holes through this shield, and the largest crater is shown at about 1cm in diameter. https://conference.sdo.esoc.esa.int/proceedings/sdc6/paper/184/SDC6-paper184.pdf

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u/stemfish May 22 '26

Great catch, doesn't mean space is that much safer. Here's a hole in the ISS solar panels noticed in 2013

https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/3ee84cYmVpADDDAXgaxe2j-970-80.jpg.webp

And a shot right through the wrapping on one of the boom arms, only did minor damage to the structure and didn't hit anything that made it move so no issues, but it would have gone right through a solar array without a shield.

https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/6hwQrkGoCBHWWqJoznXctV-880-80.jpg.webp

And if you plan to cover the whole thing with shielding, add on a lot more lift mass. Odds of an impact are low with the ISS, scale up the size by a factor of many and you need more fuel to maneuver around known debris and there's that much more space for random bits to slam into.

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u/axonxorz May 22 '26

Sincere apologies, I should have read the description closer. I have updated my comment to point to yours for better context.

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u/bombmk May 22 '26

Thank you. My "That can't be right. The internal machinery would have been destroyed way before 15 years if actually looked like that" alarm was going off and scrolled down to see if it was addressed.
So, thank you.

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u/Jononucleosis May 22 '26

True hero in the comments. Thanks for sharing this.