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NASA ISS Space

NASA Confirms That Debris From ISS Crashed Into Florida Home (nbcnews.com) 57

Posted by BeauHD from the lost-and-found dept.
NASA has confirmed that a piece of metal that tore through a Florida home last month was space junk from the International Space Station. NBC News reports: The agency confirmed Monday that the 1.6-pound object was debris from a cargo pallet that had been intentionally released from the space station three years ago. The pallet, packed with aging batteries, was supposed to burn up harmlessly in Earth's atmosphere, but a piece survived -- the piece that smashed into a house in Naples, Florida, on March 8.

WINK News, a CBS News affiliate in southwestern Florida, first reported the incident. Naples resident Alejandro Otero told the outlet that the object crashed through the roof and two floors of his home. Otero was not home at the time, he told WINK News, but the metal object nearly hit his son, who was two rooms away. In a blog post about the incident, NASA said it had analyzed the object at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and confirmed that it was part of the equipment used to mount the batteries on the cargo pallet.

The piece of space junk is roughly cylindrical in shape and is about 4-inches tall and 1.6-inches wide. NASA said agency staff studied the object's features and metal composition and matched it to the hardware that had been jettisoned from the space station in 2021. At that time, new lithium-ion batteries had recently been installed at the space station, so the old nickel hydrogen batteries were packed up for disposal. The space station's robotic arm released the 5,800-pound cargo pallet containing the batteries over the Pacific Ocean, as the outpost orbited 260 miles above the Earth's surface, according to NASA. NASA said it will perform a detailed investigation of the latest debris incident to determine how the object withstood the extreme trip through the atmosphere.
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NASA Confirms That Debris From ISS Crashed Into Florida Home More

NASA Confirms That Debris From ISS Crashed Into Florida Home

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  • I'm sure that I'm not the only one who is curious, considering that the damage to his home was more than minor.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Bert64 ( 520050 )

      He's lucky not to have been killed, 1.6lbs of metal travelling at high speed is basically a small cannonball.

    • First you would need to know who is responsible for the batteries being jettisoned in the first place. The ISS isn't just NASA after all.

    • Compensating him is probably cheaper than having their source of funding pissed off at them, or having to do safe deorbit of all their trash.

    • The best for both sides would be to let him keep the debris. No cost for NASA and he could probably sell it to some collector for a lot more than the price of a few shingles and a piece of drywall etc.

      • Re:Let him keep the debris (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 17, 2024 @07:44AM (#64400888)

        The best for both sides would be to let him keep the debris. No cost for NASA and he could probably sell it to some collector for a lot more than the price of a few shingles and a piece of drywall etc.

        HUGE cost to nasa!

        A) NASA will compensate the homeowner either way,
        B) The scientific value to NASA is huge, the material analysis on why it didn't burn up as expected and what needs changed in their current projection models will, among other purposes, ultimately help keep this kind of thing from happening again in the future.

        Letting the homeowner keep it robs us of this knowledge, and would not be in leu of paying for damages but in addition to it.

        Also don't forget, "NASA paying" really means "us tax payers paying"
        I as a tax payer am not objecting to paying for the damages, that is the right thing to do, but if we can prevent such things moving forward and not be in the situation of needing to pay for damages, I would say that is a better use of our tax dollars compared to letting this sample sit on some collectors shelf.

        • What are they going to learn? It was a solid lump of an extremely temperature resistant alloy. Maybe if it had been a tube it would have burned up like it was supposed to, but this is basically what you would make if you were hoping a part would survive reentry.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by dougmc ( 70836 )

          Arguably, the homeowner may not want to give it up -- the debris is likely to be worth way more to a collector than the damage it caused, especially since there's video of the crash.

          Of course, then the question of "who owns it?" comes up -- the ISS *clearly* discarded it, and by chance it ended up in the homeowner's possession.

          Typically, meteorites belong to the land owner where they fall, and this isn't debris from a crash like we had with Columbia -- it's literally trash from space.

          So, maybe the lawyers w

      • The cost to fix the house would amount to a rounding error in NASA's budget. Let's hope they do the right thing, and chuck in free front row seat for next big launch to boot.

    • I'm sure some branch of the government will cover the damages. Realistically on a governmental scale the cost to repair the damage is peanuts so even if they COULD argue their way out of legal responsibility, the PR just isn't worth it.

      • That's not how governments work.

        They're just like everyone else, and the last thing in the world that they wanted to do is file an insurance claim. They also have no interest in giving you cash too.

        This typically leaves you with the option of suing the government, for your damages, which can happen, but most common outcome, is that you have to file a claim with your own insurance, then they have to go after the government, to get what is now their money.

    • Yes, now a bunch of different laws and treaties come into play. There are funds and procedures already in place. the big issue was the verification it was space junk and came from a USA device.
      Those treaties are interesting in that if that junk had been from another country it would have been the responsilibty of the US government to collect the money from the other country and then pay you.

  • Fairly normal (Score:3)

    by johnw ( 3725 ) on Wednesday April 17, 2024 @02:54AM (#64400418)

    The space equivalent of the hand reaching out of a car window and casually dropping a McDonald's box.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      There are a lot more satellites now though, so the probability of this happening is higher.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by guruevi ( 827432 )

        Still infinitesimally small. 70% of the planet is still water and only 2% of the land has been built upon by humans and only a fraction of that is actually human housing and actual people. Compared to the total tonnage of stuff that goes up on a yearly basis (and must come down), only 20 incidents totaling a few kg are known and most of those did not involve major damages or injury.

    • If McDonald's made their boxes out of titanium.
  • So this is the equivalent of dropping a huge space turd out of orbit onto someone's house and saying that the residents of the house should be happy they were so blessed?

    • Yes. And if it did kill the kid they can always fall back on, "God has a plan."

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by cstacy ( 534252 )

        Yes. And if it did kill the kid they can always fall back on, "God has a plan."

        Now all I can think about is Tricia Helfer landing on my face.

  • how much the compensation will be? I wonder how much the space junk is worth and who gets to keep that? I imagine it will be given to a museum
  • No telling how many other pieces survived and hit without witnesses or publicity.
    • The odds of it hitting land at all, let alone anywhere populated, have to be fairly small. Perhaps even... astronomical

  • Inconel (Score:4, Interesting)

    by sphealey ( 2855 ) on Wednesday April 17, 2024 @06:49AM (#64400754)

    An irregularly shaped chunk of solid Inconel? Sure to tumble as it passes through the atmosphere? I don't think anyone who worked in high temperature industrial process was surprised by this; not sure what NASA was thinking.

  • Pretty close the Dead Like Me.

  • When I was a kid Skylab was going to fall to earth and they marketed Skylab Lotion that would protect you from debris or your money back. It was a nice reassurance.
    • I have no memory of that, though I remember it falling. Any pics of ads or anything? I'd love it for the nostalgia.

      • Same here, although I was 9 at the time. I recorded the news on a tape recorder that day as Skylab was falling, just because I thought it was the craziest thing that something from space was falling and may hit something.

        • Yeah I was 15. That's why I'd think I'd have remembered something as silly as lotion to protect you but I've never really cared abound hand or body lotions so who knows? I'd love to see an ad tho :-)
  • Who would believe anything from a news source named wink?

  • I would have thought NASA would calculate a re-entry trajectory for a 5,800-pound cargo pallet that would safely take it to a graveyard in the Pacific. Apparently they assumed it would all vaporize in the upper atmosphere so they didn't bother. Or maybe it isn't so easy to determine where something will fall after some dozens of orbits that rely on atmospheric drag to slow it down.

    Some components of the pallet may be more durable than they realized. Or it could be that such a large object full of nickel hyd

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      The pallet was jetisonned, not de-orbited. You can't predict where something that you just let float away from the space station is going to land until just before it comes down.

      • >> The pallet was jetisonned, not de-orbited

        I didn't say it was "de-orbited", though clearly it was intended to leave orbit eventually.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

          I didn't say you did.

          I would have thought NASA would calculate a re-entry trajectory for a 5,800-pound cargo pallet that would safely take it to a graveyard in the Pacific.

          If you deorbit something, i.e. attach a rocket to it and reduce it's orbital velocity so it reenters and lands in fairly short order, you can "calculate a re-entry trajectory" for it.

          If you jettison it, and let random atmospheric drag gradually do the job over the next three years, you can't.

    • Normally they bring spent battery packs back to Earth with returning astronauts, but due to a scheduling snafu, they decided to fling this load.

  • ...were aiming for Mar-a-Lago"

  • ... everyone gets upset when I dump my car batteries in the ocean.

  • property values went up.
  • Whilst NASA (and the family) are very lucky that no-one was injured, this could have been a big diplomatic incident. In Florida NASA can talk to the the insurers and everything can get smoothed over. It could have landed elsewhere in the world.

    Whilst the Krelin is too far north, hitting the Russian army just east of Ukraine would not have been good. Whilst funny, Kim Jong Un finding this in his bathtub would no doubt have caused the State department some embarrassment.

    NASA programs need to treat this a

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