International Space Station Trash May Have Crashed Into Florida Home

NAPLES, FL — Alejandro Otero is waiting for confirmation from NASA about whether a piece of the International Space Station fell on his house in Naples in early March, crashing through two layers of ceiling and narrowly avoiding hitting his son.

Otero, who was on vacation at the time, told news station WINK that his son called to report the damage. From the way his son described it, “immediately, I thought: meteorite,” he said.

It was a solid guess.

Most of the rocky shards of comets and asteroids in space burn up in the atmosphere and are seen as bright meteors streaking across the sky, but about 17,000 a year survive and fall to Earth as meteorites. And space rocks have hit houses, as recently as last year, when a 4 billion-year-old meteorite hit a home in Mercer, New Jersey.

One look at the 2-pound object when he returned home from his vacation early and Ortero was disabused of that notion.

“It used to have a cylindrical shape, and you can tell by the shape of the top that it traveled in this direction through the atmosphere,” he told WINK. “Whatever you burned, created in this burn and melted the metal over in this direction.”

Otero said he was “completely in disbelief.”

“What are the chances of something landing on my house to cause so much damage?” he told the news station. “I’m super grateful nobody got hurt.”

‘This Two-Ton Thing’

A home security camera captured the sound of the crash at 2:34 p.m. local time on March 8, which corresponds with the time U.S. Space Command recorded the reentry of trash from the space station over the Gulf of Mexico, according to Ars Technica, a technology trends news and review site.

Ars had previously reported that NASA jettisoned the pallet with nine spent batteries weighing about 5,800 pounds, or 2.6 metric tons — the most massive cargo ever discarded from the space station — in 2021 after a series of delays made it impossible to send the trash back to Earth in a more controlled manner. It careened around our planet for three years before falling out of orbit and back into the atmosphere in an unguided reentry on March 8, the site reported.

NASA said in a 2021 statement that it expected the pallet and its contents to burn up harmlessly. The European Space Agency, which was also monitoring the pallet’s reentry, said that while the risk of parts of the pallet hitting a person was “very low,” some pieces of it could reach the ground.

Otero posted photos of the object that fell on his home on the social media platform X on March 15 and asked for help getting someone from NASA to return his messages and emails.

He also reached out to Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian, who told Gizmodo that a 2.6 metric ton pallet was too large for an uncontrolled reentry.

“NASA was rolling the dice … and they made an unlucky throw,” he said, adding, “So you had this two-ton thing that reentered the atmosphere and this is some small fragment of it that survived and went through this poor guy’s house.”

NASA has recovered the object. Engineers at Kennedy Space Station wil analyze it “as soon as possible to determine its origin,” Josh Finch, another NASA spokesperson, told Ars.

No Process To Report ISS Junk

What happens next is unclear. There’s no explicit procedure for reporting space junk from the International Space Station, and what agency would be responsible for compensating Otero and his family is also a complex question. If it turns out the object came from the United States, he could sue under the Federal Tort Claims Act, Michelle Hanton, executive director of the Center for Air and Space Law at the University of Mississippi, told Ars.

“It gets more interesting if this material is discovered to be not originally from the United States,” Hanton said. “If it is a human-made space object which was launched into space by another country, which caused damage on Earth, that country would be absolutely liable to the homeowner for the damage caused.”

NASA owned the batteries, but the pallet structure was launched by Japan, according to Ars.

After more than 60 years of space exploration, about 28,000 of 56,450 satellites and other launched items regularly tracked by the U.S. Space Surveillance Network and maintained in a catalog remain in orbit, according to the European Space Agency. Of those, only about 4,000 are intact and operational satellites today.

Manmade space debris has hit Earth before, including the 1979 crash of Skylab, the first U.S. space station, on western Australia. More recently, part of the SpaceX Dragon capsule hit an Australian sheep farm in 2022.

Also in 2022, a 23-ton piece of debris from China’s Long March 5B rocket fell safely into the south-central Pacific Ocean after speculation about where it might come back to Earth. China had been criticized for not developing a way for it rockets to safely come back to Earth.