There’s a lot more junk floating around Earth than there used to be

Space oddities

Another day, another “cloudy with a chance of space debris” forecast in North America: a farmer in rural Canada recently found an 88-pound, 2-meter-wide hunk of charred metal that astronomy experts believe is from a SpaceX rocket that shed the fragment in February. He plans to sell it to raise money for a hockey rink.

The Canadian discovery follows news of a much smaller piece of space junk crashing through the roof of a Florida home in early March. They’re part of a growing phenomenon, with 200-400 man-made objects reentering Earth’s atmosphere on average each year, most of which are mission-related debris from spacecraft, particles from disintegrations, and paint flecks… or dead satellites that continue to orbit the Earth long after we can still make use of them.

According to the BBC, there’s only one known case of someone being hit by falling space debris — an Oklahoma resident was harmlessly hit on the shoulder in 1997 — but the risk is real even if highly unlikely: the European Space Agency (ESA) reports that space agencies and nation states accept a 1-in-10,000 chance of a casualty from a single uncontrolled reentry.

Those stats may pickup in the coming years though, as the ESA tracks the ever-growing number of man-made objects that clutter the space around Earth. At the end of last year, a staggering 36,500 space debris objects over 10 cm in length were orbiting the Earth — perhaps little shock to anyone familiar with the Kessler Syndrome, a concerning theory that the more space junk there is, the more collisions there will be, causing a self-perpetuating chain reaction that could result in Earth’s orbit becoming essentially unusable.