- In May, a massive piece of space debris crashed into the mountains of North Carolina.
- After reviewing the incident, NASA confirmed that it originated from a SpaceX Dragon capsule.
- This accident, and others, show how difficult it will be to reduce the risk of debris falling to Earth.
NASA has confirmed that a piece of space debris as big as a car hood found in North Carolina belonged to a SpaceX Dragon capsule, according to a statement from 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 a portion of it, called the trunk, is not reusable and is discarded just before the capsule returns to Earth.
It was that log that ended up crashing onto a trail at a mountain resort just outside Asheville in May. “It was just crazy. It was insane,” Justin Clontz, the ranger who came across the large piece of debris, told Space.com.
No one was injured in the impact. But the space debris shouldn’t have been there. NASA said in its statement that evaluations of Dragon’s initial design showed it was supposed to completely disintegrate in Earth’s atmosphere. But that’s not always the case.
A similar piece of dragon trunk was found in Franklin, North Carolina, in June. And another landed in a farmer’s field in Saskatchewan, Canada, in April.
It’s not just SpaceX debris that’s falling to Earth. A five-pound piece of debris, slightly smaller than a soda can, fell from the International Space Station in March, crashing onto a family’s roof in Florida. The family is now suing NASA over the incident.
This series of recent accidents shows how difficult it can be to predict and model when space debris will or will not burn up in Earth’s atmosphere. It is more important than ever to improve these models.
Humans are launching more missions into space than ever before
Space debris has been falling from the sky since the 1960s, but humans are launching more things into space than ever before. According to the website Our World in Data, in 2023, a record 2,664 objects, including satellites, spacecraft, landers and more, were sent into or beyond Earth’s orbit.
“Once these things die, they’re just abandoned. It’s like trash in orbit. And then it’s up to Mother Nature to figure out how these things come back,” Moriba Jah, associate professor of aerospace engineering and mechanical engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, told BI.
Jah is referring here to uncontrolled reentries, that is, the free fall of space debris towards Earth without anyone being able to control their trajectory.
Modeling uncontrolled reentries involves a lot of uncertainty and is therefore more complex than modeling controlled reentries, which typically involve rockets guiding the trajectory of debris, ensuring that it lands in a safe area, such as the ocean.
“For uncontrolled objects, 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 tilting,” Jah said. which partners with ServicePlan Innovation on space waste panels to study and visualize the consequences of space pollution.
Uncontrolled reentry typically occurs with smaller pieces of space debris that are expected to break up in the atmosphere before reaching the ground, such as the Dragon capsule’s trunk.
Even though these pieces of space debris are relatively small compared to car-sized satellites, they are not harmless. They travel at thousands of kilometers per hour before impact.
If the debris that crashed outside Asheville, North Carolina, in May had hit a person, it almost certainly would have killed them, Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and a leading expert on space debris, told BI.
Although the chances of space debris hitting a person are astronomically low, a 2022 study published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature estimates that there is about a 10% chance that one or more people will be hit within 10 years.
How to reduce the risk of falling space debris
NASA wrote in its statement that it would use debris recovered from the North Carolina mountain station to improve debris modeling.
Another option NASA should consider, McDowell said, would be to reduce the number of uncontrolled reentries and use controlled deorbit even for small space objects.
“Then you know exactly when and where it’s going to fall,” McDowell said.
Currently, controlled atmospheric reentries are relatively rare. About 200 to 400 objects large enough to track reenter Earth’s atmosphere each year, and only a handful of those are controlled atmospheric reentries, according to The Aerospace Corporation.
For controlled reentry to remain the status quo, new laws and federal funding would be needed to help NASA and companies like SpaceX clean up their waste, Jah said.
The federal government is responsible for approving space launches, but it doesn’t hold launch organizations like NASA or SpaceX accountable for safely disposing of objects. That needs to change, Jah added.
“Working in space always involves some uncertainty, but NASA strives to ensure its operations are safe for the public and strives to continually improve its processes,” NASA wrote in a statement to BI.
SpaceX did not respond to BI’s request for comment.