- In May, a huge piece of space debris landed in the mountains of North Carolina.
- After reviewing the incident, NASA confirmed it originated from SpaceX’s Dragon Capsule.
- These and other accidents highlight how difficult it will be to reduce the risk of falling debris impacting Earth.
NASA has confirmed that a piece of space debris the size of a car hood found in North Carolina belonged to the SpaceX Dragon Capsule, according to a statement the agency shared on X.
The Dragon Capsule is a reusable spacecraft that carries astronauts and cargo to and from the International Space Station. But part of it, called the trunk, is not reusable and is discarded just before the capsule returns to Earth.
That suitcase ended up crash-landing on a trail at a mountain resort just outside of Asheville in May. “It was just wild. It looked crazy,” site manager Justin Clontz, who came upon the large debris, told Space.com.
No one was injured in the crash. But the space junk wasn’t supposed to be there in the first place. NASA said in a statement that an evaluation of the original Dragon design showed that it would have completely disintegrated in the Earth’s atmosphere. But that doesn’t happen every time.
A similar piece of dragon trunk was found in June in Franklin, North Carolina. And another landed in a farm field in Saskatchewan, Canada in April.
It’s not just SpaceX junk falling to Earth. A two-kilogram piece of debris slightly smaller than a soda can fell from the International Space Station in March and crashed through a family’s roof in Florida. The family is now suing NASA over the incident.
These series of recent accidents underscore how difficult it can be to predict and model when space debris will and will not burn up in Earth’s atmosphere. Improving these models is more important than ever.
Humans are launching more into space than ever before
Space junk has been falling from the sky since the 1960s, but humans are launching more stuff into space than ever before. According to the “Our World in Data” website, a record 2,664 objects, including satellites, spacecraft, landers and more, were sent into or beyond Earth orbit in 2023.
“Once those things die, then they’re just abandoned. It’s like circulating garbage. And then it’s up to Mother Nature to figure out how to re-enter the thing,” Moriba Jah, associate professor of aerospace engineering and engineering mechanics at The University of Texas at Austin. BI said.
Jah means uncontrolled re-entries. It’s when space debris is free-falling toward Earth with no one directing its direction.
Modeling uncontrolled re-entires involves a lot of uncertainty and is therefore more complex than modeling guided re-entires, which usually involve rockets that control the trajectory of the debris and ensure that it lands in a safe area such as the ocean.
“With uncontrolled things, all bets are off because you don’t necessarily know what the orientation of the object is when it hits the atmosphere or how it’s going,” Jah said. which works with ServicePlan Innovation on Space Trash Signs to study and visualize the consequences of space pollution.
An uncontrolled re-entry usually happens with smaller pieces of space debris that are expected to break up in the atmosphere before they even reach the ground – such as the Dragon Capsule.
While this space junk is relatively small compared to, say, car-sized satellites, it’s not harmless. They travel at thousands of miles per hour before impact.
If the piece of debris that crashed outside of Asheville, North Carolina, in May landed on a person, it would certainly kill them, Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and a leading expert on space debris, told BI.
While the chances of space debris hitting a human are astronomically low, a 2022 study published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature estimates that there is about a 10% chance of one or more people being hit within 10 years.
How to reduce the risk of falling space debris
NASA wrote in a statement that it will use the debris recovered from the North Carolina mountain resort to improve debris modeling.
Another option NASA should consider, McDowell said, was to reduce the number of uncontrolled re-entries and use controlled de-orbit even for small space objects.
“Then you know exactly when and where it’s going to hit,” McDowell said.
Right now, controlled re-entries are relatively uncommon. About 200 to 400 objects large enough to track reenter Earth’s atmosphere each year, and only a handful are controlled re-entries, according to The Aerospace Corporation.
Making controlled reentry the status quo would require new laws and federal funding to help NASA and companies like SpaceX clean up their mess, Jah said.
The federal government is responsible for approving space launches, but does not make launch entities like NASA or SpaceX responsible for the safe disposal of objects. That has to change, Jah added.
“Working in space always carries some uncertainty, but NASA works to ensure its operations are safe for the public and strives to continuously improve processes,” NASA wrote in a statement to BI.
SpaceX did not respond to BI’s request for comment.