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What is the greatest distance from its launch site that a failed rocket (or its debris) has landed?

  • Failures only. This excludes surface-to-surface or surface-to-air missiles, which are intended to hit a target. Also excludes missiles that are targets for anti-missile weapons.
  • Launch only. Exclude spacecraft that have reached orbit, even if they later fall out of orbit.
  • Include the debris of a rocket that was destroyed because it was malfunctioning.
  • Landing off-target is covered in this question.

This question asks in part about the specifications for range safety used to place a launch site in Florida. If such information is public, then it should be answered there. Otherwise, the answer to this question gives a good idea of how large a "safe area" would need to be.

DrSheldon
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  • Sounding rockets? – Organic Marble Apr 30 '20 at 02:38
  • @OrganicMarble: Good point. Only counts if the rocket failed (item #1 above). – DrSheldon Apr 30 '20 at 02:42
  • Thanks. There was a V-2 out of Ft. Bliss that might be a candidate. – Organic Marble Apr 30 '20 at 02:49
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    Successful launches can drop a lot of things too, range safety isn't only about failure. – uhoh Apr 30 '20 at 03:29
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    @uhoh: Fair enough, but let's approach the question as written. – DrSheldon Apr 30 '20 at 03:33
  • There are some very far away ones for sure. E.g if you have a 2nd stage failure on the way to LEO, or even an upper stage failure to GTO, it would take many orbits for it to reenter, if it ever does. – user3528438 Apr 30 '20 at 05:45
  • @OrganicMarble: Even if the V-2 doesn't end up as the farthest launch failure, is it interesting or useful enough to write up as an answer? – DrSheldon Apr 30 '20 at 13:50
  • @DrSheldon I'll look for details. – Organic Marble Apr 30 '20 at 13:52
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    @DrSheldon turns out it wasn't very far at all. Just politically incorrect. https://www.nytimes.com/1947/05/30/archives/wild-v2-rocket-invades-mexico-backtracks-in-a-white-sands-test.html – Organic Marble Apr 30 '20 at 13:54
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    Within the literal constraints of your question, Surveyor 2 crashed approximately 380,000 km from the launch site after the failure of one of the third-stage engines left it uncontrollable. None of the Surveyor probes ever reached orbit -- they were launched on a direct-injection trajectory from the Earth's surface to the Moon's surface. – Mark Apr 30 '20 at 23:07

2 Answers2

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A satellite with SNAP-9A plutonium energy unit was launched from Florida in 1964. It failed to reach orbit.

Debris fell in Southern hemisphere including Madagascar.

It's more than 14000 km fom the launch site.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_for_Nuclear_Auxiliary_Power

Heopps
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  • Good answer, a solid 70% of the maximum possible distance of 20000km (if the debris landed at the exact antipode of the launch site), and only 20% of the earth's surface is farther away than 14000km. – Nuclear Hoagie Apr 30 '20 at 15:18
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    Theoretically speaking, I can come up with scenarios whereby the downrange distance to impact would be greater than half of our planet's circumference... – Digger Apr 30 '20 at 17:06
  • @Digger What's the downrange distance if you go more than once around? (I'm thinking of an orbital shot that goes at too low an angle and goes into "orbit" too low to actually stay up there.) – Loren Pechtel Apr 30 '20 at 19:15
  • @NuclearWang I know it's nitpicking, but I'm pretty sure that all of Earth's surface is closer than 14000km ;-) – JohnEye Apr 30 '20 at 19:50
  • @JohnEye that depends on your metric. Nuclear Wang is using one that weighs less the surface paths, while yours seems to be Euclidean. See the taxicab metric for an analogy. – Ruslan Apr 30 '20 at 20:02
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    @JohnEye Technically, you are correct, the best kind of correct. Let me know how your trip to Madagascar via the Earth's core goes, I hear it's lovely this time of geological era. – Nuclear Hoagie Apr 30 '20 at 20:33
  • @LorenPechtel I'm thinkin' that, in the case you mention, the fun usually ends as the craft approaches its first perigee, pretty much halfway around the world...unless another burn is done. Anything further would, perhaps, best be described as being a case of orbital decay. – Digger May 01 '20 at 15:41
  • @Digger I'm picturing something where perigee is high enough it can stay up for an orbit or two, but not really high enough to call orbital decay. – Loren Pechtel May 01 '20 at 19:34
  • @LorenPechtel Well, in that case, I guess you'd just take the total distance covered by the doomed craft's groundtrack... – Digger May 03 '20 at 02:52
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Soyuz 7K-T No.39 The mission was expected to dock with the orbiting Salyut 4 space station, but due to a failure of the Soyuz launch vehicle the crew failed to make orbit. The capsule landed southwest of Gorno-Altaisk. 2 500 km from Baikonur Cosmodrome

A. Rumlin
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