Currently, the odds of being struck by lightning are higher than being hit by falling space junk. But those odds are changing. A Federal Aviation Administration study concluded that by 2035, debris from SpaceX satellites alone could cause one death or injury every two years. https://t.co/651RFwQsZp

More and More Space Debris Is Falling to Earth: How Dangerous Is It?

Source: https://cn.nytimes.com/world/20260803/space-debris-falling-crashing-earth-risk/?utm_source=tw-nytimeschinese&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=cur

One afternoon last December, the sky tore open, and a chunk of searing metal wider than a school bus came crashing down.

It slammed into a farm field in the village of Mukuku, about a three-hour drive south of Nairobi, Kenya’s capital, with a roar louder than thunder, terrifying everyone in the village.

“People thought it was the end of the world,” said John Mukunu, who lives nearby.

Villagers rushed to the scene and found a massive metal ring, taller than a person and heavier than a horse, embedded deep in the soil. They watched it cool from a blinding ember to a dull gray. They stood guard over it, occasionally taking selfies with it, until officials from the capital descended on the village.

The metal ring had been part of a rocket connector. It was supposed to have burned up on its way back to Earth.

By Dean Olson, Via Storyful

“This was an isolated incident,” the Kenya Space Agency said in early 2025.

It was not.

More space debris is falling to Earth than ever before — one consequence of the feverish race by governments and companies like SpaceX to command the skies.

Last year, the U.S. Space Force issued warnings for nearly 820 objects entering Earth’s atmosphere. A decade ago, the government issued warnings for just 110.

“Reentry events happen every day,” said Mariusz Słonina, head of space situational awareness operations at the Polish Space Agency. He noted that giant objects weighing a ton or more come down roughly once a week.

The vast majority of debris burns up in the atmosphere or falls into the Pacific Ocean, but when it fails to burn up completely, it crashes to the ground uncontrolled and unpredictably.

The more objects humanity launches into orbit, the more debris it has to dodge on Earth. More than 300 rockets were launched last year — nearly four times as many as a decade ago. That means more remnants and discarded parts are expected to fall back down.

Dead satellites are another common relic of this space age. Of the roughly 16,000 satellites in orbit, a significant number will eventually return to Earth.

In 2024, discarded hardware from the International Space Station crashed through (https://www.nasa.gov/blogs/spacestation/2024/04/15/nasa-completes-analysis-of-recovered-space-object/) the roof of a home in Florida. In early last year, part of a SpaceX rocket fell (https://polsa.gov.pl/wydarzenia/informacja-polsa-dotyczaca-znalezionych-w-polsce-potencjalnych-elementow-rakiety-falcon-9/) near a busy shopping center in Poznań, Poland. Another piece was found near the city’s airport, according to the Polish Space Agency.

A few months later, a defunct Chinese satellite plummeted over Tenerife, one of Spain’s Canary Islands, throwing the region into panic before the three-ton satellite disintegrated and burned up midair.

In October, miners found burning debris along a desert road in Western Australia. More recently, giant “space balls” have washed up (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/07/world/australia/queensland-australia-space-balls-debris.html) on Australian beaches.

A metal “space ball” washed up on a beach in Queensland, Australia, in June.

A metal “space ball” washed up on a beach in Queensland, Australia, in June. Queensland Fire Department

Regulation of rocket launches and orbital junk is a patchwork of rules that has failed to keep pace with the expansion of space activity.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX has more than 10,000 satellites in orbit and has applied to launch another million (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/26/climate/spacex-climate-musk-orbiting-data-centers.html). Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin has similar ambitions; China’s “mega-constellation” is expected to include hundreds of thousands of satellites (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/10/world/asia/china-space-reusable-rocket-launch-spacex.html).

For now, people are more likely to be struck by lightning than by falling space junk. The only recorded case of someone being hit by debris was an Oklahoma woman in the 1990s, who survived with little injury (https://aerospace.org/article/satellite-reentry-manipulating-plunge).

But those odds are shifting. A Federal Aviation Administration study (https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/Report_to_Congress_Reentry_Disposal_of_Satellites.pdf) concluded that by 2035, debris from SpaceX satellites alone could cause one death or injury every two years.

The study concluded that the risk would be lower if satellites burned up in the atmosphere. For a time, SpaceX said all its returning satellites would burn up. In 2024, however, larger pieces of SpaceX metal were found on a Canadian farm. SpaceX, which had disagreed with the agency’s report, did not respond to questions. The company now says that around 5 percent of the mass of certain satellites may not break apart.

“Human imagination often lags behind. We just can’t imagine this happening to us,” said Sean O’Keefe, a Syracuse University professor and former NASA administrator.

“It just has to land in a major metropolitan area,” he added.

O’Keefe and other experts say governments and companies should be required to use materials that can fully disintegrate.

No such regulations exist. In the United States, the Federal Communications Commission requires companies to report the risk of casualties from falling satellites, but the agency is primarily focused on regulating radio frequencies.

The Federal Aviation Administration, which regulates launches, had proposed a rule governing orbital debris disposal, but the agency withdrew the proposal in January (https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/01/15/2026-00680/mitigation-methods-for-launch-vehicle-upper-stages-on-the-creation-of-orbital-debris-withdrawal) amid opposition from the space industry.

The liability for space debris that injures people or damages property is governed by U.N. treaties, but these are Cold War-era instruments with limited scope. The United Nations issued space debris guidelines in 2007, when there were far fewer satellites, and these guidelines (https://www.unoosa.org/pdf/publications/st_space_49E.pdf) are not binding.

If an object is in free fall, even the best rocket scientists cannot accurately predict where it will land or whether it will burn up completely. According to The Aerospace Corporation, a nonprofit research institute, a one-minute error in predicting reentry time can shift the landing zone by nearly 480 kilometers.

For example, in January, a fireball streaked through the atmosphere over Europe. It was the upper stage of a Zhuque-3 rocket, launched the previous month by the Chinese company LandSpace, which had then lost control.

Space agencies around the world tracked the object for four days. It was so heavy — about 11 tons — that they expected it would not burn up completely.

Governments worried it might fall over a populated area. British officials asked mobile networks to test their emergency alert system (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/01/29/emergency-alert-check-chinese-space-junk-crash-britain/).

“The final hours, the final orbits were over Europe, and that was really dangerous,” said Słonina of the Polish Space Agency.

In the end, the debris fell somewhere in the Indian or Pacific Ocean.

Rocket debris is inflaming geopolitical tensions.

China’s newest launch site is on Hainan, an island off China’s southern coast.

Many of the fall zones around it that could receive debris are in disputed waters of the South China Sea.

For years, Filipino fishermen have faced standoffs with Chinese coast guard in these waters (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/12/world/asia/south-china-sea-chinese-navy-philippines-collision.html). Now, they also have to keep an eye out for rocket debris.

Whenever China notifies pilots or sailors about a launch from Hainan, Philippine authorities advise people not to go to sea, said Gay Jane P. Perez, director general of the Philippine Space Agency.

Over the past four years, 13 pieces of rocket debris — some as large as small boats — have washed ashore in the Philippines. The space agency says most of the debris bears Chinese characters or markings with the Chinese flag.

“In the past, we focused on sea lanes. Now we even have to deal with rocket debris,” Perez said.

If space junk hits you or your house, who is responsible?

If the debris belongs to a company or agency in your own country, the local legal system will resolve liability.

If not, your country may rely on U.N. treaties to recover damages.

For example, the Liability Convention gives states the right to claim compensation when a space object of another state causes loss of life, injury, or damage to property. Another treaty, the Agreement on the Rescue of Astronauts, the Return of Astronauts and the Return of Objects Launched into Outer Space, allows governments to be reimbursed for returning space objects.

But these treaties were drafted in the early days of the space age, when nations were more concerned about astronauts becoming prisoners of war or technology being stolen, said Rosanna Dai-Hoffmann, a legal and policy officer at the U.N. Office for Outer Space Affairs.

She added that the provisions are now being applied to a far more commercialized and complex space environment.

“The way the treaties were drafted is not the way the treaties are used today,” she said.

So the first step is identifying where debris came from. That means ordinary people have to rely on their governments.

In Kenya, authorities took months to confirm that the metal ring was part of a French rocket that launched a U.S. television satellite. According to the French space agency, the debris had been orbiting Earth for more than 16 years before crashing down.

Kenya’s government has not formally asked France for compensation, the French Foreign Ministry said. The Kenyan government has also not shared that information with the villagers, who say the impact cracked nearby homes, according to Senator Daniel Maanzo, who represents the area.

“The government said they had to first identify the owner of the object, because that’s where the negligence would be,” Maanzo said.

“But that hasn’t happened,” he said. “There’s been no compensation.”