SPACE debris raining down on Earth is increasingly at risk of causing “catastrophic” collisions with aircraft, a damning new report has revealed.
A sharp rise in the number of rocket launches has fuelled uncontrolled reentries of space debris – chunks of metal and machinery.
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Controlled reentries of space debris are carefully monitored by space companies and agencies, with a landing destination in mind – usually the ocean.
But uncontrolled landings, where experts are unsure of where space debris will land, are becoming more common.
There are more than 2300 rocket bodies currently swinging round in Earth’s orbit, which will eventually fall back down to Earth, the report published in Nature warned.
“Uncontrolled reentries of space objects create a collision risk with aircraft in flight,” experts from the University of British Columbia, Canada wrote.
“While the probability of a strike is low, the consequences could be catastrophic.”
The risk of an aircraft being affected by uncontrolled space debris reaches as high as 26% in areas of busy airspace, the report cautioned.
These include parts of the northeastern United States, northern Europe, or around major cities in the Asia-Pacific region.
The collision risk for any space debris reentry increases with air traffic density, the report continued.
Experts warned that airspace authorities like the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) will increasingly have to consider the risk of falling space debris, as Earth enters a new space-faring era.
The FAA was forced to create a Debris Response Area and slow aircraft near SpaceX’s Starbase facility in Texas, after its Starship rocket exploded during a test launch on 16 January.
A number of aircraft were kept grounded where space debris was actively falling.
While flights over the Gulf of Mexico were made to alter course to avoid the falling wreckage.
Leftovers from the 400ft rocket body were seen spraying across the sky, with debris mostly falling in the Atlantic, near the Turks and Caicos islands.
Rocket parts and disused satellites are designed to burn up during their reentry into Earth’s atmosphere, or plunge into the oceans.
But there were reports of Starship debris being found on land in the area.
Too many close calls
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.
In 2022, four airspaces in Europe were closed, and 11 monitored, when a 20tonne Long March 5B rocket body fell back down to Earth.
It was predicted to reenter Earth’s atmosphere over southern Europe, but eventually reentered over the Pacific Ocean.
The report said the location “was a result of chance rather than design”.
It added: “The rocket body was abandoned in orbit and left to return to Earth in an uncontrollable manner.”
Although warnings have been issued previously, it was the first time airspace had been fully closed due to space junk hurtling towards Earth.
Nearly 650 flights were delayed as a result, which experts say could cost the airline industry a lot of money if repeated.
A half-tonne metal ring crash landed on a village in Kenya in late December, still glowing red and hot from its fiery descent.
In April last year, an object thought to be from the massive EP-9 equipment pallet 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.”
What is space debris?
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.
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