NASA has confirmed that the object that fell into a Florida home last month was part of a battery pack released from the International Space Station.
This extraordinary incident opens a new frontier in space law. NASA, the homeowner, and attorneys are navigating little-used legal codes and intergovernmental agreements to determine who should pay for the damages.
Alejandro Otero, owner of the Naples, Florida, home struck by the debris, told Ars he is fairly certain the object came from the space station, even before NASA's confirmation. The circumstances strongly suggested that was the case. The cylindrical piece of metal tore through his roof on March 8, a few minutes after the time US Space Command reported the reentry of a space station cargo pallet and nine decommissioned batteries over the Gulf of Mexico on a trajectory heading forward the coast of southwest Florida.
On Monday, NASA confirmed the object's origin after retrieving it from Otero. The agency said in a statement that the object is made of the metal alloy Inconel, weighs 1.6 pounds, and is 4 inches in height and 1.6 inches in diameter.
"As part of the analysis, NASA completed an assessment of the object’s dimensions and features compared to the released hardware and performed a materials analysis," the agency said. "Based on the examination, the agency determined the debris to be a stanchion from the NASA flight support equipment used to mount the batteries on the cargo pallet."
A jolt from the sky
Otero was out of the country when his house came under the crosshairs, but his 19-year-old son was home. The impact sounded like fireworks going off, Otero said in an interview Tuesday. A recording from Otero's Nest camera captured the noise.
The son "was sitting in front of his computer doing homework with his earphones listening to music, and he was jolted out of his chair with a very loud sound," Otero said.
AdvertisementAfter surveying the damage when he got home, Otero filed a police report, and first responders helped pull the object out of the subfloor between the first and second stories of his house. It penetrated the roof and ceiling of an unoccupied second-floor bedroom, then hit the floor between the bed and a bathroom and struck a piece of air conditioning ductwork. It hit so hard that it created a bump on the ceiling of the first floor but didn't penetrate it, according to Otero.
Something the size and mass of this battery support stanchion would have probably struck the house with a terminal velocity of more than 200 mph (320 km per hour). At that speed, the results could have been deadly.
"Luckily, nobody got hurt," Otero said.
Hello. Looks like one of those pieces missed Ft Myers and landed in my house in Naples.
Tore through the roof and went thru 2 floors. Almost his my son.
Can you please assist with getting NASA to connect with me? I’ve left messages and emails without a response. pic.twitter.com/Yi29f3EwyV
— Alejandro Otero (@Alejandro0tero) March 15, 2024
A quick glance at the object indicated to Otero that it probably came from space. "It's super dense, a very strong alloy, a very interesting metal," he said. "When I saw that it was half-charred and that it had a cylindrical shape that had taken a concave shape from traveling through the atmosphere, I knew it had to be coming from outer space.
"I knew it was manmade," Otero continued. "I just didn't know where it was from until I started googling."
Otero said he found Ars' original article on the reentry on March 8, along with posts about the event on X. That's when he contacted a local news outlet. WINK News, the CBS affiliate for southwest Florida, was first to report on the damage to Otero's home. After Otero tried several times to contact NASA officials, an attorney from Kennedy Space Center called him to hear his story. NASA then dispatched someone to pick up the object from Naples.
"This is very unique," Otero said. "I don't think I've seen or heard, after my own research, any of these events occurring."
Setting precedent
By all accounts, this is the first time a piece of space junk has fallen out of orbit and damaged someone's home, at least in the United States. This means Otero and his attorney, Mica Nguyen Worthy, are entering uncharted legal waters as they prepare to file a claim with NASA for damages.
Otero's insurance covered damages to his home, but the provider will make a subjugated claim to seek reimbursement, Worthy said. Otero will also file a claim for unspecified non-insured damages, she said.
Michelle Hanlon, executive director of the Center for Air and Space Law at the University of Mississippi, said the Federal Tort Claims Act outlines the government's liability for damages in instances like this one. But Worthy said the laws in this area "may be inadequate."
"This may be a situation where we have to make the claim and make the law... and we'll see how NASA responds," she said. "We have a good rapport with the (NASA) general counsel. Our goal is to make Alejandro whole, but in addition to that, we're trying to engage in a conversation about what do responsible space operations look like in the international picture."
An intergovernmental agreement outlines the apportionment of liability among the partner nations on the International Space Station. While the metal fragment that struck Otero's home was apparently an item from NASA, it was mounted aboard a cargo pallet launched by Japan.
NASA completed a multi-year upgrade of the space station's power system in 2020 by installing a final set of new lithium-ion batteries to replace aging nickel-hydrogen batteries that were reaching end-of-life. Officials originally planned to place pallets of the old batteries inside a series of Japanese supply freighters for controlled destructive reentries over the ocean.
AdvertisementBut a series of delays meant the final cargo pallet of old batteries missed its ride back to Earth, so NASA jettisoned the batteries from the space station in 2021 to head for an unguided reentry. Ars published details of the circumstances that led to this in a previous story.
This isn't the way NASA prefers to get rid of space debris, but managers decided they couldn't keep the pallet at the space station, where it took up a storage location needed for other purposes. NASA expected the roughly 5,800 (2.6-metric ton) battery pallet to fully burn up during reentry.
But Otero's experience shows that was not the case, and it's possible other fragments may have fallen in the Gulf of Mexico or in unpopulated areas of southwest Florida. NASA said it will "perform a detailed investigation of the jettison and reentry analysis to determine the cause of the debris survival and to update modeling and analysis, as needed."
The European Space Agency (ESA) also monitored the trajectory of the battery pallet last month. At the time, ESA concluded that "some parts may reach the ground."
"NASA specialists use engineering models to estimate how objects heat up and break apart during atmospheric reentry," the agency said in a statement Monday. "These models require detailed input parameters and are regularly updated when debris is found to have survived atmospheric reentry to the ground."
The agency said it remains committed to "mitigating as much risk as possible to protect people on Earth when space hardware must be released."
A low but non-zero risk
Predicting where and when something will reenter the atmosphere is also full of uncertainty. Fluctuations in the density of the upper atmosphere continually increase or decrease the amount of aerodynamic drag affecting an object in low orbit. Space Command, which tracks roughly 50,000 objects in orbit, narrowed its reentry prediction for the battery pallet from six hours to four hours shortly before it actually fell out of orbit.
The battery pallet's track was well-established, so officials knew the exact parts of the planet it would fly over during the reentry window. But in six hours, the object would complete four orbits of Earth. The pallet's track in the six-hour window Space Command released early on the day of reentry took it over all six populated continents.
Otero told Ars he hopes the incident fosters an "intelligent" conversation about the risk of falling space debris without sensationalizing it. According to ESA, the risk of a person getting hit by a piece of space junk is about 65,000 times lower than the risk of being struck by lightning. The series of events that led to a chunk of metal falling from space through Otero's roof was a "perfect storm," he said.
"Because of this incident, it's really raised the awareness that it's not theoretical that these objects can make it to the ground ... and potentially cause damage," Worthy said.
"I don't think we are entering a period where we need to start worrying about space junk hitting us every time we go outside, but we should definitely get used to these stories," Hanlon told Ars in an email.
AdvertisementOne of the most well-known reentry debris incidents occurred in 2003 when a piece of the doomed space shuttle Columbia smashed through the roof of a dentist's office in Texas. Fortunately for those who worked there, the Columbia accident happened on a Saturday when the office was closed. The Columbia accident differs from Otero's experience because the shuttle was flying back to Earth for a controlled reentry.
A person in Oklahoma was hit by a lightweight piece of material in 1997 that experts linked to the reentry of the upper stage from a Delta II rocket. It was a glancing blow, and the air helped slow down the piece of debris, so she escaped injury. There was also an incident in 1969 when a fragment from a Soviet spacecraft reportedly hit a small Japanese ship near the coast of Siberia, injuring five people.
When a large Chinese Long March 5B rocket fell out of orbit in 2020, wreckage damaged a village in the Republic of Côte d'Ivoire. The Long March 5B is a frequent offender of debris because its massive core stage makes it all the way into orbit, an unusual design feature for a rocket. This booster then comes back into the atmosphere unguided. Four Long March 5Bs have been launched to date, with more flights planned in the coming years.
"We know that NASA does modeling on their orbital debris reentry, but we don't know what other countries are doing," Worthy said. "We're in this new renaissance of space operations."
"Should there be some kind of alert system for the general public?" Worthy said. "Those are the kinds of questions Alejandro and I have been asking ourselves and talking to NASA about."
Listing image by NASA
