NASA has confirmed that a piece of space debris the size of a car hood found in North Carolina belonged to a SpaceX Dragon Capsule, according to an agency statement shared on X.
The Dragon capsule is a reusable spacecraft that transports astronauts and cargo to and from the International Space Station. But one part of it, called the trunk, is not reusable and is discarded just before the capsule returns to Earth.
This log is the one that ended up crashing on a trail at a mountaintop resort outside of Asheville in May. “It was just wild. It was a crazy sight,” groundskeeper Justin Clontz, who ran into the large debris, told Space.com.
No one was injured in the collision. But the space debris shouldn’t have been there in the first place. NASA said in its statement that evaluations of Dragon’s initial design indicated that it should completely disintegrate in Earth’s atmosphere. However, this is not what happens every time.
Debris from the Dragon Capsule landed in the middle of a train at the Glamping Collective, a mountaintop resort in North Carolina. Photos by Brett Tingley, courtesy of Glamping Collective
A similar piece of the Dragon’s 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 falling to Earth. A two-kilogram piece of debris slightly smaller than a gas can fell from the International Space Station in March, crashing into the roof of a family in Florida. The family is now suing NASA over the incident.
These recent series of 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.
More people are launching into space than ever before
The number of objects launched into space each year has increased dramatically in the last decade, and the US is the largest contributor. United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs, Our World in Data
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 site Our World in Data, in 2023, a record 2,664 objects, including satellites, spacecraft, landers and more, were sent into or beyond Earth orbit.
“Once these things die, then they’re just abandoned. It’s like the debris roll. And then it’s up to mother nature to figure out how to get the thing back in,” Moriba Jah, associate professor of aerospace engineering and engineering mechanics at The The University of Texas at Austin told BI.
Jah refers to uncontrolled reentries. It’s when space debris is free-falling toward Earth with no one controlling its flow.
Modeling uncontrolled reentries involves a lot of uncertainty and is therefore more complex than modeling controlled reentries, which usually involve rockets that guide the trajectory of the debris, ensuring that it lands in a safe area, such as the ocean.
An illustration shows satellites around Earth in 2019. Each dot represents a satellite and is not to scale. NASA
“For uncontrolled things, all bets are off, because you don’t necessarily know what the orientation of the object is as it hits the atmosphere, or how it’s falling,” Jah said. which collaborates with ServicePlan Innovation on Space Trash Signs to study and visualize the consequences of space pollution.
Uncontrolled reentry usually occurs with smaller pieces of space debris that are expected to explode in the atmosphere before ever reaching the ground – like the Dragon Capsule trunk.
Although this space debris is relatively small compared to, say, car-sized satellites, it is not harmless. They move at thousands of miles per hour before impact.
If the piece of debris that fell outside Asheville, North Carolina in May had landed on a person, it certainly would have killed them, Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and lead expert, told BI of space debris.
NASA plans to use the information gathered from the debris recovery to improve their models of space debris, according to the agency’s statement. Photos by Brett Tingley, courtesy of Glamping Collective
While the chances of space debris hitting a person are astronomically low, a 2022 study published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature estimated that there is about a 10% chance of one or more people being hit within a 10-year period. .
How to reduce the risk of falling space debris
NASA wrote in its statement that it will use debris recovered from the mountaintop resort in North Carolina 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 for even small spacecraft.
“Then you know exactly when and where it’s going to fall,” McDowell said.
Right now, controlled re-entry is relatively rare. Approximately 200 to 400 objects large enough to be tracked re-enter Earth’s atmosphere each year, and only a small fraction of these 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 debris, Jah said.
The Federal Government is responsible for approving space launches, but does not hold launch entities such as NASA or SpaceX responsible for the safe disposal of objects. That needs 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 continually improve processes,” NASA wrote in a statement to BI.
SpaceX did not respond to BI’s request for comment.
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