A fragment of an out-of-control SpaceX Starlink satellite smashed into a farm in Canada last year, New Scientist can reveal – raising questions about the risks of de-orbiting space junk.
“That’ll punch a hole in whatever it lands on, including your head,” says , an astronomer at the University of Regina in Canada.
Last July, SpaceX launched a batch of its internet-providing Starlink satellites on a Falcon 9 rocket, but a malfunction with the rocket’s upper stage left the satellites stranded in a very low orbit and unusable. It was thought the satellites were lost, presumably immolated in Earth’s atmosphere.
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Now, New Scientist can reveal that a – which was posted online in February with little fanfare – details how a 2.5-kilogram segment of one of these satellites landed on a farm in Saskatchewan, Canada.
This incident marks the first time Starlink debris has been known to crash-land on Earth. While nobody was injured, the fact that this wasn’t made public by SpaceX when the debris was discovered in August last year concerns Lawler. “They clearly don’t think this is a big deal,” she says. “Whoops, we dropped potentially lethal debris on another country!”
SpaceX’s report focuses on how Starlink satellites are decommissioned and deorbited in a manner that the company deems to be responsible. It also that its approach “ensures that deorbiting satellites result in no risk to humans on the ground, at sea, or in the air”.
The Starlink impact on an unidentified farm in Saskatchewan is only mentioned very briefly. It explains that the aluminium shard, which was found on 20 August, was traced back to the botched July launch. This part of the satellite was expected to have disintegrated during re-entry, and that it didn’t came as a surprise to SpaceX’s engineers. “The Starlink program is aggressively working to understand whether unique conditions of the anomalous [Starlink deployment] could have contributed to how this component survived reentry,” the document states.
There are roughly 7000 Starlink satellites in orbit today, and SpaceX hopes to increase this number . When launched properly, the satellites are designed to comprehensively burn up in Earth’s atmosphere upon re-entry once they reach the end of their life. This may be , but (as far as anyone knows) fragments of them haven’t been plunging into the ground.
The incident shows that “the models we have that predict how things burn up on re-entry are still not as good as we’d like them to be,” says , an astrophysicist at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. “There’s still uncertainty about exactly which objects that are reentering are going to leave debris, and which aren’t.”
Although still rare, showers of space debris are becoming more frequent. In both January and March this year, the explosion of a SpaceX Starship test flight sprayed wreckage across the Gulf of Mexico, forcing airline flights to remain grounded or make hasty diversions.
And bizarrely, this isn’t the only time SpaceX debris has fallen on a farm in Saskatchewan. On 9 February last year, as part of the , a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft ferried several astronauts from the International Space Station back to Earth. As is routine for these missions, the cargo trunk of the spacecraft was ejected just prior to re-entry so that it would burn up in the atmosphere. But it , and at least five pieces of it careened into several farms across Saskatchewan on 26 February.
SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment.
