Trash discarded from the International Space Station tears through a man’s house in Florida, almost hitting his son and leaving him shaken.
On March 8th, 2:43 PM in Naples, Florida, a piece of space debris hurtled from the sky and crashed through the roof and then two floors of the house of Alejandro Otero while he was on vacation. Otero’s son, who was at home and only 2 rooms over from where the debris crashed through, called and informed his father about the incident, who immediately thought it was a meteorite.
Only it wasn’t. After returning home to investigate, Otero reached a different conclusion. He surmised that the 2 pound beat up metal cylinder was likely a rogue piece from trash discarded from the International Space Station. The junk in question was the Equipment Pallet 9 that contained drained batteries that had been discarded in 2021.
Discarding trash from Space crafts into the black void isn’t unusual. Trash is routinely ejected and is supposed to fall back down to Earth (sometimes a couple of years later) to be destroyed during atmospheric reentry under the immense pressure and velocity, disintegrating, and the few small pieces that do survive usually fall into the ocean.
However this specific pallet was the heaviest yet ejected, and it had been anticipated that it would not be completely destroyed. Astronomer and Astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics was tracking the debris, knowing that the pallet would make uncontrolled reentry and with at least half a ton surviving and striking the Earth. In a post on X, MsDowell shared the progress of the pallet as it fell, writing: “The EP-9 equipment pallet reentered at 1929 UTC [2.29pm Florida time] over the Gulf of Mexico between Cancun and Cuba. This was within the previous prediction window but a little to the northeast of the “most likely” part of the path. A couple minutes later reentry and it would have reached Ft Myers [Florida]”.
The European Space Agency (ESA) which had also been monitoring the pallet during its descent – and calculated that “while some parts may reach the ground, the casualty risk, the likelihood of a person being hit, is very low”. They added that, “A large space object re-enters the atmosphere in a natural way approximately once per week, with the majority of the associated fragments burning up before reaching the ground”.
Otero responded to McDowell’s post telling them that it, “Looks like one of those pieces missed Ft Myers and landed in my house in Naples [40 miles south of Ft. Myers]. Tore through the roof and went thru 2 floors. Almost hit my son”. When Otero asked to be connected to NASA to have the debris collected and damage expenses settled, McDowell said that they weren’t the ones to contact. But NASA did release a statement saying that they had, with the homeowner’s cooperation, retrieved the object and taken it to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida to thoroughly investigate its origins and release a report after a complete analysis.
In regards to settling property damage, if the object was owned by NASA, Otero or his insurance company could file charges against the federal government under the Federal Tort Claims Act. But according to Michelle Hanlon, executive director of the Center for Air and Space Law at the University of Mississippi, “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”. And that is where it gets complicated.
The drained batteries that were discarded were owned by NASA, but the pallet structure that had been holding them was launched by the Japanese Space Agency, JAXA. Otero might have to tussle not with the US, but with Japan.
Scary as it sounds, such events are not common because most space-bound objects are structurally designed to be destroyed during reentry. According to the European Space Agency, the likelihood of a person being hit by space debris is less than 1 in 100 billion every year.
