10 Times Space Junk Made a Fiery Return to Earth

Thousands of dead satellites, spent rocket stages, and fragments of shattered spacecraft are circling the planet right now. Many gradually lose altitude, but some can remain in orbit for years, centuries, or longer. Most objects that reenter burn up in the atmosphere, streaking across the sky as brief fireballs. Larger objects sometimes survive the plunge, and history is full of multi-ton machines that made it all the way to the ground. Some splash into the ocean; others scatter debris across land, including radioactive fragments in northern Canada and a piece that punched through a Florida home.

Space agencies track these objects as best they can, yet uncontrolled reentries can still surprise people standing underneath. These are ten of the most dramatic times space junk made its return to Earth.

Related: 10 Weird Space Images That Look Like Unlikely Things

10 The Kosmos 1402 Reactor Core

In late 1982, the Soviet radar satellite Kosmos 1402 finished its mission. Its nuclear reactor was supposed to separate from the spacecraft and move into a high, long-lived disposal orbit. The separation failed, and the satellite broke into three objects. The main body reentered on January 23, 1983, while the reactor section stayed in orbit for two more weeks. On February 7, the reactor finally plunged into the atmosphere over the South Atlantic.

Soviet officials insisted the reentry posed no danger, but Western scientists investigated signs of radioactive debris afterward. Researchers detected radioactive strontium in Arkansas rainwater collected between February and June 1983. They concluded the pattern indicated that the fresh nuclear debris most likely came from the reactor aboard Kosmos 1402.^[1]

9 Salyut 7

The Soviet space station Salyut 7 had been uncrewed since 1986, when its final crew left. A docked module’s engines boosted the station’s orbit by about 84 miles (135 kilometers), extending its time in space while a future shuttle retrieval was considered. But heightened solar activity warmed and expanded Earth’s upper atmosphere, increasing drag on the station and hastening its descent.

On February 7, 1991, the Salyut 7–Cosmos 1686 complex, weighing about 88,000 pounds (40 metric tons), made an uncontrolled reentry. It overshot its intended landing area in the South Pacific and streaked over Argentina as a brilliant fireball. Fragments were recovered near the town of Capitán Bermúdez. Nobody on the ground was hurt.^[2]

8 The Delta II Second Stage

On the morning of January 22, 1997, the second stage of a Delta II rocket came screaming back into the atmosphere over the American Midwest. It had launched a U.S. Air Force satellite from California in April 1996 and had been decaying in orbit ever since. The stage broke apart about 48 miles (77 kilometers) above Kansas, scattering debris across Oklahoma and Texas. A stainless-steel propellant tank weighing about 551 pounds (250 kilograms) landed just 165 feet (50 meters) from a farmhouse near Georgetown, Texas.

But the most famous piece of the debris field landed on a person. Lottie Williams was walking with friends in a Tulsa, Oklahoma, park at about 3:30 in the morning when she saw a huge ball of fire cross the sky. Minutes later, something tapped her on the shoulder and dropped into the grass: a blackened piece of woven fiberglass about six inches long. Its material was consistent with insulation from the Delta II stage, but the fragment was never conclusively matched to that specific rocket. Williams was unhurt and is widely described as the only person known to have been struck by falling space debris.^[3]

7 The Long March 5B Over Côte d’Ivoire

China launched its powerful Long March 5B rocket on May 5, 2020. As with later flights, its massive core stage was left in orbit with no planned controlled deorbit. At nearly 44,000 pounds (20 metric tons), it was one of the largest objects to make an uncontrolled reentry in decades. On May 11, it broke apart over the Atlantic and Africa. Debris was recovered near the village of Mahounou in Côte d’Ivoire, including a large pipe-like piece. Local reports also described damage to homes and a cheesemaker’s building, though no casualties were reported.

NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine criticized the uncontrolled reentry, calling it dangerous and noting that the stage’s path could have put it over New York had it come down earlier. Unlike many rocket stages, the Long March 5B core had no planned controlled disposal to direct it toward a safer landing area.^[4]

6 The Long March 5B Over Borneo

Two years after the Côte d’Ivoire incident, China sent another Long March 5B core stage tumbling toward an uncontrolled reentry. On July 24, 2022, the rocket carried the Wentian laboratory module to China’s Tiangong space station, then remained in orbit with no way to steer itself home. The roughly 48,500-pound (22-metric-ton) stage reentered on July 30 UTC, breaking apart over the Indian Ocean as people in Malaysia watched fiery fragments streak across the sky. Witnesses in Kuching, on the island of Borneo, filmed the display and initially mistook it for a meteor shower.

The reentry passed over Malaysian airspace, and Philippine authorities reported that surviving components made landfall in the Sulu Sea near Palawan. Most of the rocket was expected to disintegrate in the atmosphere. The debris did not land in Borneo or Brunei, despite those areas being discussed in pre-reentry forecasts.^[5]

5 Tiangong-1

China’s first space station, Tiangong-1, was supposed to operate for two years after its 2011 launch, but it continued working until controllers lost contact in March 2016. With no way to command a controlled deorbit, the 18,700-pound (8.5-metric-ton) station began a slow descent that turned into a global guessing game. Tiangong-1 reentered on April 2, 2018, Beijing time, over the central South Pacific.

Most of the station burned up in the atmosphere. China reported that the South Pacific was the reentry area, but the station’s descent was uncontrolled, and no fragments were recovered. Even a spacecraft that had stopped communicating years earlier held the world’s attention as its final orbit brought it back toward Earth.^[6]

4 The SpaceX Crew Dragon Trunk

On the morning of July 9, 2022, residents across Australia’s Snowy Mountains were jolted by a thunderous sonic boom. The likely source was the discarded trunk of SpaceX’s Crew-1 Dragon capsule, which had been jettisoned before the spacecraft returned to Earth in May 2021. Large pieces survived reentry and landed on farmland around Dalgety, New South Wales. Sheep farmer Mick Miners found a charred object nearly 10 feet (3 meters) tall in his paddock on July 25; neighbor Jock Wallace had found another piece earlier.

Astrophysicist Brad Tucker linked the debris to the SpaceX reentry based on its timing and location. The Australian Space Agency confirmed that the recovered objects came from a SpaceX mission. Nobody was hurt, and the finds became a striking reminder that some spacecraft parts can survive the fiery trip back through the atmosphere.^[7]

3 The ISS Battery Pallet

In March 2021, the International Space Station released a cargo pallet carrying about 5,800 pounds of old nickel-hydride batteries, the heaviest load of trash ever jettisoned from the station. Engineers expected the hardware to burn up completely when it reentered three years later, on March 8, 2024. They were wrong. A 1.6-pound metal stanchion made of heat-resistant Inconel survived the plunge and struck a home in Naples, Florida.

NASA retrieved the object and confirmed in April 2024 that it was a battery-mounting stanchion from the pallet. The agency said it would investigate why its reentry models had failed to predict that the piece would survive. The incident left one Florida family with a very expensive hole in its home and showed that even carefully modeled disposals can go wrong.^[8]

2 Skylab

America’s first space station, Skylab, was doomed by the sun. Stronger-than-expected solar activity warmed and expanded Earth’s atmosphere, increasing drag on the 170,000-pound (77-metric-ton) station and pulling it down years ahead of schedule. NASA could adjust Skylab’s attitude as it fell, hoping to direct the debris footprint toward the Indian Ocean. On July 11, 1979, the station broke apart in a spectacular reentry. A small error in the breakup calculation shifted the debris hundreds of miles farther east than intended, scattering wreckage across Western Australia.

Nobody was injured, but the Shire of Esperance responded with bureaucratic humor, issuing NASA a $400 littering fine. The fine went unpaid for 30 years, until California radio host Scott Barley raised the money from listeners and paid it in 2009. Seventeen-year-old Stan Thornton found fragments on his property and flew to San Francisco to claim a $10,000 newspaper prize. A large piece of Skylab even made a cameo onstage at the Miss Universe pageant in Perth, cementing the station’s fall as one of history’s more entertaining reentries.^[9]

1 Cosmos 954

The most frightening space junk reentry in history began on September 18, 1977, when the Soviet Union launched Cosmos 954, a radar surveillance satellite powered by a small nuclear reactor. The satellite was designed to eject its reactor into a high orbit at the end of its mission, but the separation mechanism failed, leaving the reactor on board. On January 24, 1978, Cosmos 954 disintegrated over northern Canada, scattering radioactive debris across 47,900 square miles (124,000 square kilometers) of the Northwest Territories, Alberta, and Saskatchewan.

Canada and the United States launched Operation Morning Light, a months-long search across the frozen wilderness. The cleanup continued into October, but Canadian authorities estimated that only about 0.1 percent of Cosmos 954’s power source was recovered. The crash raised international concerns about nuclear-powered satellites, and the United Nations later established a working group to study their use in space.^[10]