When a Florida family filed a claim against NASA over “space junk” that fell through their roof earlier this year, it launched a potentially precedent-setting question: Who is liable when debris from space causes damage or injury?
Nobody was hurt when a cylindrical object that was part of a pallet of used batteries from the International Space Station came sailing through Alejandro Otero and his family’s roof in what their attorney called a “near miss,” but the claim for a more than $80,000 includes uninsured property damage and emotional anguish.
Space junk – any of the millions of pounds of objects left by humans in space ranging from small nuts and bolts to pieces of defunct satellites – falls into Earth’s atmosphere every day. The vast majority of it burns up on its way down, but every so often, pieces fall to the surface. They most often land in oceans, which cover most of Earth’s surface, and other unpopulated places on land.
Very rarely, they have caused damage or minor injury, but experts say a growing amount of junk in space means those occurrences may happen more frequently in the future.