A LARGE glowing ring of metal plummeted on a village in Kenya on Monday, in a shocking reminder of Earth’s looming space debris problem.
Villagers discovered the “red and hot” object, which is suspected to be a rocket separation ring, on 30 December.
The object measures 2.5metres in diameter and weighs about 500kg.
The Kenyan Space Agency said “secured the area and retrieved the debris”, and that it would analyse the object to see which agency or business it belongs to.
“Such objects are usually designed to burn up as they re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere or to fall over unoccupied areas, such as the oceans,” the space agency said, describing the incident as “an isolated case.”
Parts from old rockets and disused satellites are designed to burn up during their re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere, or plunge into the oceans.
Although that is not always the case, and while rare, space debris can crash land into inhabited areas of Earth.
In April last year, an object thought to be from the massive EP-9 equipment pallet that was jettisoned from the ISS crashed two floors into a Florida man’s home.
Homeowner Alejandro Otero claimed the cylindrical object nearly hit his son, and later sued Nasa for more than $80,000 in compensation.
Then in June, Nasa admitted that a separate hunk of space debris that fell on a walking trail in North Carolina belonged to a SpaceX capsule.
While there have been no civilian fatalities from falling space debris, experts have suggested this could soon change with the growing number of commercial space launches.
“This is a real serious danger,” former Nasa administrator Sean O’Keefe told The Sun in an interview last year.
“The frequency in which we’ve seen [space] debris crash in Australia and Siberia over the years – fortunately, it’s places that are either not populated or are very remote.
“We’re not gonna get lucky like that every time.”
Space debris is an umbrella term for any bit of junk, disused equipment and otherwise, that is currently stuck in Earth's orbit.
And it has spiralled into a big problem since the dawn of the space age in the 1950s.
There are nearly 30,000 objects bigger than a softball hurtling a few hundred miles above Earth, ten times faster than a bullet.
It poses huge risks to satellites and the International Space Station (ISS), where crew occasionally have to maneuver out of the way of objects hurtling towards them.
In 2016, a fleck of paint managed to chip a window in the ISS because it was moving at such high speeds in Earth’s orbit.
The problem is, it’s not just a space issue – but Earth’s too.
Objects in space undergo a process called orbital decay, which means they orbit closer to Earth as time goes on.
Debris left in orbits below 600km normally fall back to Earth within several years.
While most space debris burns up on reentry to Earth’s atmosphere – there are some bits that don’t.
This is particularly the case with larger objects, like the EP-9 pallet.
A report by US watchdog, the Federal Aviation Authority, published last year warned that space debris that survived the fiery reentry could kill or injure someone on Earth every two years by 2035.
Paul Bate, the boss of the UK Space Agency, also warned that the speed in which space junk is growing is faster than the rate of plastic in the oceans.
“The good news is the vast majority of satellites and other debris in space does burn up in the atmosphere at the end of its life,” he said.
“And then if it does stay intact or some parts of it, most of it lands in the ocean, and then the small amount that doesn’t in an uninhabited area.
However, the space chief warned that the more satellites and rocket bodies that launch into space, “we are likely to see an increase in debris coming to Earth, simply because there are going to be more satellites up before”.
By Millie Turner, Senior Technology & Science Reporter
At the current rate, it’s only a matter of time before we have our first casualty from man-made space objects.
No one has yet died from falling space debris, though there have been plenty of instances of infrastructure damage and even injuries.
In 2002, six-year-old boy Wu Jie became the first person to be directly injured by falling space junk, after 20 metal rocket chunks showered on his village in China.
Fast forward to January 2025, and we have a 500kg metal ring falling on a village in Kenya.
The choppy irregularity of space launches pre-SpaceX meant Nasa could afford to rely on the chance of expended metal falling into the ocean or in an uninhabited area – if it hadn’t already burnt up.
But that won’t work for much longer.
