Nasa solves mystery of space debris that tore through man’s house

Nasa has confirmed a piece of space junk that fell through the roof of a man’s house was trash from the International Space Station (ISS).

The 10cm piece of metal, which weighed just 0.7kg, smashed its way through two floors of the Florida home after surviving a fiery re-entry on March 8.

The space agency said it was a metal support used to mount old batteries on a cargo pallet for disposal.

The pallet was jettisoned from the space station in 2021, and the load was expected to eventually fully burn up on entry into Earth’s atmosphere, but one piece survived.

Alejandro Otero, the unlucky homeowner whose house was struck, shared security footage which captured the sound of the space junk crashing back to Earth on X, formerly Twitter.

‘Tore through the roof and went through two floors,’ he wrote. ‘Almost hit my son.’

Mr Otero said at the time he had been unable to contact Nasa to discuss repairing the damage, although experts at the time suggested Japan may be liable if the debris was a piece of a battery made by the country, rather than the pallet itself.

But now it seems the culprit was very much American-made.

Damage from falling space debris is very rare, however. Most things that crash into Earth do not survive the journey, instead burning up on re-entry.

If they do make it through, luckily the planet is very, very big, so the chances of it colliding with people or property are very slim. The European Space Agency (ESA) estimates the risk of a person being hit by space debris at less than one in 100 billion every year.

Near misses have happened however, including in December when both side boosters from a Chinese Long March 3B rocket fell over Guangxi in the south of the country. One was filmed exploding in a fireball as it fell into woodland, but the other crashed just metres from a house.

In 2022, a huge piece of debris from a SpaceX rocket landed in a farmer’s field in Jindabyne, New South Wales, Australia. 

And in 1997, Lottie Williams was struck on the shoulder by a piece of metal while walking in a park in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Although never 100% verified as space debris, Nasa confirmed the timing and location was consistent with the path of a Delta rocket as it broke up over the country, making Ms Williams the only person thought to have been hit by falling space junk.

Luckily it was only a glancing blow, and she lived to tell the tale.