One December afternoon, the sky tore open and a fiery hunk of metal, wider than a schoolbus, came hurtling down.
It was louder than a thunderclap when it plunged into a patch of farmland, startling everyone in the village of Mukuku, about three hours south of Nairobi, Kenya.
“People were thinking this is the end of the world,” said John Mukunuu, who lives nearby.
When the villagers arrived, they found a giant ring, taller than a man and heavier than a horse, lodged into the earth. They watched it cool from a glowing ember to a dull grey. They guarded it, taking the occasional selfie, until officials from the capital swarmed the village.
The ring had once connected parts of a rocket. It was supposed to have burnt up on its return to Earth.
“This is an isolated event,” the Kenya Space Agency said in early 2025.
Not exactly.
More space debris is raining down on Earth than ever before – one effect of the frenetic race among governments and companies such as SpaceX to reign over the skies.
Last year, the United States Space Force issued alerts for nearly 820 objects entering the Earth’s atmosphere. The US government issued alerts for 110 objects a decade ago.
“The re-entries happen each and every day,” said Mariusz Slonina, who heads space situational awareness operations for the Polish Space Agency. Huge objects weighing a metric tonne or more arrive about once a week, he said. Much of the debris incinerates in the atmosphere or splashes into the Pacific Ocean, but when it does not, it plummets to the ground, uncontrolled and unpredictable.
The more objects humans launch into orbit, the more debris they will have to dodge on Earth. More than 300 rockets launched last year, nearly four times as many as a decade ago. That means many more bits and spent parts are expected to drop back.
Dying satellites are another common detritus of this space age. A good number of the roughly 16,000 satellites in orbit will ultimately come back to Earth. In 2024, discarded hardware from the International Space Station crashed into a Florida home. Early last year, part of a SpaceX rocket landed near a busy shopping mall in Poznan, Poland. Another piece was found near the city’s airport, according to the Polish Space Agency.
Months later, a defunct Chinese satellite barrelled down over Tenerife, in the Canary Islands. The three-metric-tonne satellite sent shock waves across the region before fragmenting and burning up in the air.
In October, miners discovered burning debris on a desert road in Western Australia. Recently, giant “space balls” washed ashore on an Australian beach.
The patchwork of regulation governing rocket launches and orbital junk is no match for the pace of space development. Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which has more than 10,000 satellites in orbit, has applied to launch a million more. Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin has similar ambitions and Chinese “mega-constellations” are expected to have hundreds of thousands of satellites.
For now, people are more likely to be struck by lightning than by falling space junk. The only documented case is of an Oklahoma woman who was hit by debris in the 1990s. She survived relatively unharmed.
But those odds are shifting. A study for the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) concluded that by 2035, debris from SpaceX satellites alone could kill or injure someone every two years.
The risk diminishes if satellites burn up in the atmosphere, the study concluded. For a while, SpaceX said that all its returning satellites incinerated. Then, in 2024, a chunk of SpaceX metal was found on a Canadian farm. SpaceX, which previously disagreed with the FAA report, did not respond to questions. The company now says that about 5 per cent of the mass of some satellites may not disintegrate.
Sean O’Keefe, a professor at Syracuse University in New York and former Nasa administrator, said: “Humans have a lot of failure of imagination. We just can’t imagine that it will happen to us.”
“All it’s got to do is show up in a major metropolitan area,” he added.
O’Keefe and other experts say that governments and companies should be compelled to use materials that will fully disintegrate. No such regulation exists. In the United States, the Federal Communications Commission requires companies to report on the risk of casualties from falling satellites, but the agency mostly focuses on regulating radio frequencies.
The FAA, which oversees launches, proposed a rule to regulate the disposal of orbital debris but it withdrew the idea in January after the space industry pushed back.
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United Nations treaties govern liability for space debris that hurts people or damages property, but those are cold war relics with limited scope. The UN issued guidelines for space debris in 2007, when there were far fewer satellites. Those guidelines are nonbinding.
If objects are in free fall, even the best rocket scientists cannot accurately predict where they will land or whether they will fully incinerate. A one-minute error in predicting re-entry changes the landing zone by around 500km, according to the Aerospace Corporation, a non-profit research group. In January, for example, a fireball pierced the atmosphere over Europe. It was the upper stage of a Zhuque-3 rocket that went out of control after a Chinese firm, Landspace, launched it the previous month.
Space agencies across the world monitored the object for four days. It was so heavy – about 11 metric tonnes – that they did not expect it to incinerate. Governments feared that it could plunge into heavily populated areas. British officials told mobile networks to test the emergency alert system.
“The last hours, last orbits were over Europe, and it was really dangerous,” said Slonina of the Polish Space Agency.
In the end, the debris splashed down somewhere in either the Indian or Pacific ocean.
China’s newest launch pad is in Hainan, an island off the country’s southern coast. Many of the surrounding drop zones, where debris is likely to fall, are in contested waters in the South China Sea. Filipino fishermen have for years faced confrontations with the Chinese coast guard in these waters. These days, they also have to watch for rocket debris.
Philippine authorities advise against going to sea whenever China notifies pilots or mariners about a launch from Hainan, said Gay Jane P Perez, director general of the Philippine Space Agency. Thirteen rocket pieces, some the size of small boats, have washed ashore in the Philippines in the past four years. Most had markings with Chinese characters or parts of the Chinese flag, the space agency said.
“Before, we were looking at access to the sea. Now we’re even getting rocket debris,” Perez said.
If the debris belongs to a company or an agency in your country, the local legal system settles the liability questions.
If not, your country will likely rely on UN treaties to recoup costs.
The liability convention, for one, gives countries the right to compensation if another state’s space object hurts people or damages property. Another treaty, called a rescue and return agreement, allows governments to be paid for the cost of returning space objects.
But the treaties were written in an era when countries were more concerned about astronauts becoming prisoners of war or technology being stolen, said Rosanna Deim-Hoffmann, who works on law and policy issues at the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs.
“The way the treaty was drafted is not the way the treaty is used nowadays,” she said.
The first step, then, is confirming where the debris came from. That means everyday people are at the mercy of their governments. In Kenya, authorities took months to confirm that the ring was a part of a French rocket that had launched an American television satellite. The debris orbited Earth for more than 16 years before crashing, according to the French space agency.
Kenya’s government has not formally requested compensation from France, the French foreign ministry said. It also has not shared this information with the village residents, who said that the impact damaged nearby homes, according to Daniel Maanzo, a senator who represents the area.
“The government says they have first to identify the owner of the object, because that’s the one who is the source of negligence,” Maanzo said.
“That didn’t happen,” he said. “There was no compensation.”
This article originally appeared in the New York Times.
