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Who pays if your home is damaged by debris that has fallen from space?
That might seem, for the moment, like an academic question. But it won’t be for long. Human beings are hurling more objects into space than ever before. And some objects that are sent up to space don’t always stay there.
Today, my colleague Selam Gebrekidan writes about the growing perils of space junk.
When flaming chunks of metal crash into Earth
By Selam Gebrekidan
One December afternoon in 2024, the sky tore open and a fiery hunk of metal came hurtling down.
It plunged into a patch of farmland about three hours south of Nairobi, Kenya. Residents of a nearby village found a giant ring, heavier than a horse, lodged into the earth. They watched it cool from a glowing ember to a dull gray. 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 burned 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 like SpaceX to reign over the skies.
“The re-entries happen each and every day,” said Mariusz Slonina, who heads space situational awareness operations for the Polish Space Agency. Huge objects that weigh a ton or more now arrive about once a week, he said.
Much of the debris incinerates in the atmosphere or splashes down in the ocean. But when it does not, it plummets to the ground, uncontrolled and unpredictable. And there’s only going to be more of it in the years to come.
What goes up sometimes comes down
A good rule of thumb: The more objects humans launch into space, the more debris we will have to dodge on Earth. And lately, we’ve been launching a lot of objects into space.
More than 300 rockets launched last year, nearly four times as many as 10 years ago.
Humans have put around 16,000 or so satellites into orbit; Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which owns a majority of them, has applied to launch one million more.
For now, people are more likely to be struck by lightning than by falling space junk. (The only documented case of a person being hit by debris is an Oklahoma woman in the 1990s. She survived relatively unharmed.) But the odds are changing.
In 2024, discarded hardware from the International Space Station crashed into a Florida home. Early last year, parts of a SpaceX rocket landed near a shopping mall and an airport in western Poland.
Months later, a defunct Chinese satellite barreled down over Tenerife, one of the Canary Islands of Spain. The three-metric-ton satellite sent shock waves across the region before fragmenting and burning in the air.
If objects are in free fall, even the best rocket scientists cannot accurately predict where they will land or whether they will fully incinerate. In January, a glowing fireball pierced the atmosphere over Europe. It was the upper stage of a Chinese rocket, which had been out of control since it launched the previous month.
For four days, space agencies watched it with alarm. It was so heavy, about 11 metric-tons, that they did not expect it to burn up in the atmosphere.
In the end, the debris splashed down somewhere in the Indian or Pacific Oceans — it’s not clear which.
Next time, we may not be so lucky.
Who pays if space junk hits your house?
The patchwork of regulation currently governing rocket launches and orbital junk is no match for the pace of space development.
In the United States, the Federal Communications Commission requires companies to report on the risk of casualties from falling satellites, but the agency focuses mostly on regulating radio frequencies. The Federal Aviation Administration, 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.
The United Nations liability convention gives countries the right to compensation if another state’s space object hurts people or damages property. Another treaty, called the Rescue and Return Agreement, allows governments to be paid for the cost of returning space objects.
But the treaties were written in the early space age, when countries were more concerned about astronauts becoming prisoners of war or technology being stolen. The treaties are now being applied in a more commercial environment, one U.N. official said. (The U.N. issued guidelines for space debris in 2007, when there were far fewer satellites. Those guidelines are nonbinding.)
Back in Kenya, the impact of the ring cracked nearby homes, Daniel Maanzo, a Kenyan senator who represents the area, told me.
The Kenyan authorities took months to confirm that the ring was part of a French rocket that had launched an American television satellite. Kenya’s government has not formally requested compensation from France, the French Foreign Ministry said. It hasn’t even shared the information with village residents, Maanzo said.
As for payment? According to Maanzo, “there was no compensation.”
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