Leonard David's INSIDE OUTER SPACE

Taking the fall. Space hardware dives into Earth’s atmosphere with some fragments making their way to the ground.
Image credit: ESA/D.Ducros

Last March a high-speed cylindrical object weighing nearly two pounds shot through the roof of a Naples, Florida homeowner, smashing through a ceiling and punching through a floor.

NASA later confirmed that the object was an item from the International Space Station – a small leftover from a discarded, multi-ton pallet let loose some three years earlier.

Image credit: WINK News/Inside Outer Space screengrab

That occurrence and the follow-on confirmation that the errant object was, indeed, an old ISS battery-related part, has spun up worrisome views regarding the escalation of human-made refuse plummeting to Earth in an uncontrolled manner.

SpaceX: more trunk trash

Even more recent, more human-made space debris leftovers have been found to hot-foot their way onto terra firma.

SpaceX Dragon trunk debris falls into North Carolina.
Image credit: WLOS TV staff

This latest incident in late May is within North Carolina in which objects of various sizes and weights are being tied to surviving fragments of the jettisoned “trunk” associated with the SpaceX Dragon Crew-7 mission.

For a view of my new SpaceNews story – “Uncontrolled reentry of space debris poses a real and growing threat” – go to:

https://spacenews.com/uncontrolled-reentry-of-space-debris-poses-a-real-and-growing-threat/