Leonard David's INSIDE OUTER SPACE

Scientific American: Editor’s Note (4/16/24): This article has been updated to include information about NASA’s completed analysis of the object that struck a house in Florida.

Space-Junk Strike in Florida Signals New Era of Orbital Debris – Three years ago astronauts threw out the largest piece of trash ever tossed from the International Space Station. Now some of it has punched a hole through a house in Naples, Fla.

By Leonard David

In what may be judged as a bizarre and twisted case of “breaking and entering,” last month a plummeting cylindrical object weighing nearly two pounds hit the roof of Alejandro Otero’s home in Naples, Fla., smashed through a ceiling and punched through a floor.

When this story was first published, this high-speed home invasion from the heavens had yet to be officially verified as a space junk strike. Now, however, after retrieving and studying the object, NASA has confirmed it is debris from trash tossed three years ago from the International Space Station (ISS) that subsequently reentered Earth’s atmosphere. As the latest close encounter with clutter from the cosmos, the event has already sparked technical and legal banter about the worrisome escalation of Earth-circling, human-made refuse.

 

 

TAKING OUT THE TRASH

Back in March 2021 astronauts onboard the ISS used a Canada-supplied robotic arm to tip an abnormally hefty hunk of refuse into space—the heaviest object ever jettisoned from the space station, in fact. NASA explained at the time that the trash, called Exposed Pallet 9 (EP9), had the approximate mass of a large SUV “and is safely moving away from the station and will orbit Earth between two to four years before burning up harmlessly in the atmosphere.”

After being ferried to the ISS via a Japanese cargo ship the previous year, EP9 had been filled with 5,800 pounds of spent nickel-hydrogen batteries. But a series of logistical complications—chief among them the fact that the battery pallet could only fit in Japan’s cargo ships, of which there were no more to fly—left EP9 stranded, taking up precious space on the ISS. So NASA decided to throw it overboard. After a few years of drifting aimlessly through space, EP9 finally met its fiery fate on March 8 when its decaying orbit sent it nose-diving into Earth’s atmosphere over the Gulf of Mexico.

The European Space Agency’s Space Debris and Independent Safety Offices closely monitored the reentry of the pallet of used ISS batteries. These batteries were to undergo “a natural reentry,” said ESA in a pre-reentry communiqué, using a twist on the term for an uncontrolled plunge from space.

“The total mass of the batteries is estimated at 2.6 metric tonnes, most of which may burn up during the reentry,” ESA stated. “While some parts may reach the ground, the casualty risk—the likelihood of a person being hit—is very low.”

A SERIOUS CANDIDATE

Before NASA’s analysis was complete, Marco Langbroek, a devoted satellite tracker and a faculty member in aerospace engineering at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, told Scientific American that it certainly looked possible that the object in Florida stemmed from the reentry of the EP9 battery pack.

Langbroek had reviewed EP9’s ground track as well as the reported timing and trajectory of its reentry. Handily, there was also a time-stamped security video and sound clip of the object that pierced the homeowner’s roof.

After entering the atmosphere and losing much of its speed, the debris piece probably spent a couple of minutes in subsonic free fall, Langbroek said.

“Reentries take multiple minutes, with the object fragmenting and the reentering fragments spreading along the trajectory over a stretch that can be hundreds of miles long,” he added. “Given the force of impact, I think this is a serious candidate for potential debris from this [EP9] reentry. It might well be a part of one of the nickel-hydrogen battery cells.”

At that time, Tobias Lips, managing director of satellite aerodynamics company Hyperschall Technologie Göttingen in Germany, told Scientific American that there was not much guesswork here. As a specialist in reentry analysis, he robustly simulated the fall of the ISS pallet of batteries days before the actual event occurred using “moderately conservative” rather than “worst-case” assumptions. Even so, his results suggested more than 130 fragments would survive to reach the surface. That’s “about 10 times more than for a typical reentry object of this size and mass,” he said.

Most of those predicted fragments, Lips said, would be cylinders made of Inconel—a high-strength nickel-chromium superalloy often used in aerospace applications. Nearly 350 such cylinders were in the EP9 pallet’s payload of spent batteries, where they served as power cells. “The fragment found in Naples, Florida, is most likely one of these cylinders,” Lips said.

“The recovered fragment was reported to be about two pounds in weight. Thirty-eight percent of my [simulation’s] surviving fragments are within this mass class,” he explained. “I would be very surprised if investigations of this fragment don’t confirm it being a battery cell from the ISS.”

NASA’S ANALYSIS

After NASA officials, in cooperation with Otero, took custody of the object for closer study at the agency’s nearby Kennedy Space Center, space agency spokesperson Joshua Finch told Scientific American that “more information will be available once the analysis is complete.”

At that time, Mike Weaver, a space debris expert at the Aerospace Corporation, told Scientific American that NASA’s analysis would likely begin with a rigorous examination of the object’s trajectory—as well as that of EP9—tracked against the locations of any other recovered debris.

“In this case, the location of the object in Naples, Florida, appears to be consistent with the timing and the location of the ISS battery pallet reentry,” Weaver said. “However, this is not sufficient to positively identify an object.”

Alongside the trajectory work, scrutinizing the candidate chunk of space junk for signs of scorching, melting and other effects of reentry heating would be desirable, Weaver said. Metallurgical analysis to determine its composition could be useful as well.

Sometimes serial numbers or part numbers can be found on an object, Weaver noted, which would rapidly simplify things.

Subsequently, in the April 15 blog post in which NASA announced the completion of its analysis, the agency confirmed that the item was in fact an Inconel cylinder. But rather than being part of a battery, the cylinder was a stanchion from the space agency’s “flight support equipment used to mount the batteries on the cargo pallet.”

WHAT GOES UP MUST COME DOWN

Threats from incoming orbital rubbish are real and set to grow, says Darren McKnight, a senior technical fellow at LeoLabs, a commercial provider of space domain awareness services, based in Menlo Park, Calif. As more space systems are deployed in low-Earth orbit, the old adage applies: what goes up must come down.

The vexing nub of the problem is that removing ever proliferating small pieces of orbital debris is vital for maintaining a safe space environment—and uncontrolled atmospheric reentry is by far the easiest way to do it. In fact, this happens automatically for objects in low-Earth orbit, which begin to fall as they bleed off momentum against the outer edges of our planet’s atmosphere. Yet the hands-off nature of this process means any sizable piece of unguided debris has a large swath of the planet upon which it or its fragments might fall, potentially constituting a low but real risk to multiple aviation corridors and population centers.

“The issue of aviation and ground hazard from space operations is a problem that will not go away any time soon,” McKnight says.

LEGAL LIABILITY

Before the downed debris in question was confirmed as coming from the ISS, Joanne Gabrynowicz, a professor emerita of space law at the University of Mississippi, told Scientific American that such a finding would likely prompt a dialogue about liability.

Some of the provisions of the United Nations Outer Space Treaty and its Convention on International Liability for Damage Caused by Space Objects, as well as the ISS International Governmental Agreement (IGA), could be relevant, said Gabrynowicz, who is also editor in chief emerita of the Journal of Space Law.

An analysis of various provisions in these sources and how they interrelate would probably be necessary, Gabrynowicz said, including Article II of the U.N.’s Liability Convention. Article II states that any country launching anything into space shall be responsible for damage any associated space objects may cause back on Earth’s surface.

In the case of an object striking a house, the launching nation would, at minimum, be liable for funding requisite structural repairs. Gabrynowicz added, however, that while this protocol is simple in principle, its translation to reality can become extremely complex. Things would get murky, for instance, if the errant object that struck Otero’s house had proved to be part of the spent batteries from EP9’s reentry: the batteries are NASA’s property, but they were attached to EP9—a payload launched by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).

“That could be complicated, requiring analysis of various contracts, treaties, insurance policies and the IGA. Of course, the entities involved can also agree as to how to resolve the situation,” Gabrynowicz concluded.

AN ACT OF ABANDONMENT

“NASA will want to minimize this by saying chucking stuff off the ISS is rare and this isn’t a satellite or rocket body … and therefore is disconnected to increasing launch rates,” said Ewan Wright, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of British Columbia and a junior fellow of the Outer Space Institute, in an interview with Scientific American prior to the agency’s April 16 announcement.

“But clearly there is an issue here that uncontrolled reentries are fairly accepted, and nobody thought to look into it much further,” Wright said. One reason for laxity, he noted, is that the risks from uncontrolled space debris reentry are literally and figuratively dumped in the ocean, which covers most of Earth’s surface. But treating Earth’s seas as a space junkyard is unlikely to be sustainable forever.

“There are over 50,000 ships in the ocean at any given time and hundreds of thousands of smaller boats. The chance of a ship being hit by space debris is likely to be small, but it’s growing, and we don’t know the number for sure,” Wright said. “A cruise ship being hit by uncontrolled space debris may not kill someone, but it would raise serious questions about our continued abandonment of space debris in orbit. And the launching state would be liable to pay damages.”

Many aerospace companies employ an ethos of “design for demise” for their space-bound components to try to ensure that if the parts do reenter, they reliably burn up at high altitude. Yet even leaving aside growing concerns about the resulting contamination of Earth’s upper atmosphere with heavy metals and other pollutants, some experts consider the practice ill-advised at best.

Moriba Jah, an expert in space debris tracking and management at the University of Texas at Austin and a co-founder and chief scientist at Privateer Space, a group focused on space sustainability issues headquartered on the island of Maui in Hawaii, is one such critic.

Jah emphasizes that discarding our detritus in low-Earth orbit in hopes that this material will “naturally reenter” the atmosphere “is not a responsible disposal method but rather an act of abandonment.” Even if not legally classified as such, uncontrolled reentry “is inherently irresponsible due to the potential risks it poses to life and property on Earth,” Jah says.

NASA officials have said that they’re on the case. “The International Space Station will perform a detailed investigation of the jettison and re-entry analysis to determine the cause of the debris survival and to update modeling and analysis, as needed,” the space agency noted in its April 15 announcement.

In some sense, the unlikely intersection of a probable piece of orbital debris with a home could ultimately prove to be a good thing: it could provide another wake-up call to policymakers, major aerospace players and the public at large that when it comes to space junk in low-Earth orbit, the sky really is falling.

LEONARD DAVID is author of Moon Rush: The New Space Race (National Geographic, 2019) and Mars: Our Future on the Red Planet (National Geographic, 2016). He has been reporting on the space industry for more than five decades.