When one thinks of the peaceful, green mountains of North Carolina, space flight is not usually what comes to mind.
It is true that in the early 1960s NASA built the (now defunct) Rosman Satellite Tracking and Data Acquisition Facility among the rolling hills of Appalachia to track Soviet satellites and relay communications for the Gemini and Apollo programs. And of course there are a few pockets of dark skies over western North Carolina that make for decent satellite viewing and sky tracking.
But when it comes to the current boom in private spaceflight, these lush mountains are about as far as you can get from the busy spaceports on Florida’s Space Coast. That’s why it was such a shock when I found out that a large piece of space debris had been identified near Canton, NC – not far from where I live in Asheville.
I had to go there to see for myself.
Related: Junk food from SpaceX Dragon ‘trunk’ may have landed in Canadian farmer’s field (photo)
On May 22, groundskeeper Justin Clontz and his father were doing trail maintenance at the scenic Glamping Collective, a 160-acre luxury campground that offers private dome-style mountaintop cabins with panoramic views of the surrounding Pisgah and Cherokee National Forests.
As Clontz and his father rounded a bend in the trail that day, they came upon a strange piece of junk lying on the ground not far from the road. Roughly 3 feet by 3 feet (1 meter by 1 meter), the debris consisted of crushed carbon fiber composite and burnt metal, with exposed metal bolts and plates protruding. It had a faint smell, similar to ozone.
“It landed right in the middle of the trail,” Clontz told Space.com. “It was just wild. It looked crazy. I really didn’t know what to think.”
There was no damage to nearby trees or grass, Clontz said. It was as if someone had placed the wreckage exactly where it could be found, on a peaceful trail through the Pisgah National Forest.
Clontz and other Glamping Collective staff initially thought the debris might be from a military aircraft. “I didn’t know if we should touch it,” Clontz added.
Soon scientists would consider it.
According to astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, as it turned out, the piece of debris likely came from the return of the SpaceX Crew-7 mission to the International Space Station, which returned to Earth on March 12, 2024. . “This definitely looks consistent with being a piece of the fuselage of the Crew-7 Dragon that returned to the road directly above this location on Tuesday,” McDowell wrote on X after news of the wreckage began to spread.
The astrophysicist also released a map tracing the return path of a piece of the Crew-7 strain suspected of being responsible for the debris, which shows the spacecraft’s hardware passing directly over Canton, NC — exactly where Clontz found the sample (and disturbingly, almost directly above my house).
Here’s the return path actually west of Asheville NC (flight direction was NE) pic.twitter.com/5niV87xh51May 24, 2024
The “trunk,” as SpaceX refers to it, is the unpressurized tail section of the company’s Dragon spacecraft, which other aerospace manufacturers would call the service module. This section carries cargo or small satellites, is equipped with solar panels that power the Dragon when the craft is in flight or docked with the ISS, and has fins for aerodynamic control during an emergency abort.
While the Dragon capsules make it safely back to Earth in controlled descents that are eventually slowed by parachutes, “the spacecraft trunk remains attached to the Dragon until shortly before re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere,” SpaceX writes on its website, after which it is jettisoned.
Furthermore, it appears that not only can these logs stay in orbit for weeks longer than their host capsules, but large chunks of them can also remain intact after their fiery re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere.
“The discovery of SpaceX Dragon fuselage debris from the Crew-7 mission in North Carolina, following debris from the Ax-3 trunk in Saskatchewan and the Crew-1 trunk in Australia, clearly demonstrates that trunk materials regularly survive reentry. in large chunks,” McDowell wrote on X in May, referring to two other similar-looking pieces of debris found in Saskatchewan, Canada, in May 2024 and in the Australian outback in August 2022.
SpaceX eventually sent a team to investigate the fall of the Australian debris, a senior director of SpaceX’s spaceflight program said after the event.
But SpaceX has not yet reached out to the Glamping Collective about the alleged wreckage, an on-site manager told Space.com.
Despite how alarming these discoveries may seem, there is no need to panic. According to the Aerospace Corporation, the chance of being struck and injured by falling space debris is less than one in a trillion, far less than the risk of being struck by lightning or even bitten by a shark.
Clontz realizes how rare the discovery is, and said the discovery of the debris doesn’t worry him about more pieces of space junk falling in his vicinity. “I looked up at the sky a few times today,” he said with a laugh. “But it doesn’t scare me. I mean, how many planes fly over every day? How many satellites are up there in orbit?”
The Glamping Collective plans to build a display case for the debris along the trail where it was found.