NASA has confirmed that the object crashed into a house in Florida last month part of the battery pack launched from the International Space Station.
This unusual incident opens a new frontier in space law. NASA, homeowners and lawyers are navigating little-used legal codes and intergovernmental agreements to determine who should pay damages.
Alejandro Otero, owner of the Naples, Florida, home hit by debris, told Ars that he was fairly certain the object came from the space station, even before NASA's confirmation. Circumstances clearly show that this is the case. The cylindrical piece of metal tore through the roof of Otero on March 8, minutes after the U.S. Space Command reported the return of a space station cargo pallet and nine discontinued batteries operating over the Gulf of Mexico on a trajectory toward the southwest coast of Florida.
On Monday, NASA confirmed the object's origin after retrieving it from Otero. The agency released a statement saying the object was made of Inconel metal alloy, weighed 1.6 pounds, was 4 inches tall and 1.6 inches in diameter.
“As part of the analysis, NASA completed an assessment of the object's dimensions and features compared to released hardware and performed materials analysis,” the agency said. “Based on testing, the agency determined the debris was a fixture from NASA flight support equipment used to attach batteries to cargo pallets.”
A shock from the sky
Otero left the country when his house was monitored, but his 19-year-old son remained at home. Otero said in an interview Tuesday that the crash sounded like fireworks exploding. A recording from Otero's Nest camera captured the noise.
Otero said the son “was sitting in front of the computer doing homework with headphones on and listening to music when he was thrown out of his chair with a very loud sound.”
After surveying the damage upon arriving home, Otero alerted police and first responders helped pull the object out of the subfloor between the first and second floors of his home. It went through the roof and ceiling of an unoccupied second-floor bedroom, fell to the floor between the bed and the bathroom, and hit a piece of air conditioning ducting. According to Otero, it hit so hard that it created an impact mark on the first floor ceiling but did not penetrate.
Something the size and mass of this battery support pole could have hit the house at a final velocity of more than 200 mph. At that rate, the results could be deadly.
“Fortunately, no one was injured,” Otero said.
Glancing at the object, Otero could see that it might have come from space. “It's super dense, a very strong alloy, a very interesting metal,” he said. “When I saw it was half burned and had a concave cylindrical shape from moving through the atmosphere, I knew it must have come from outer space.
“I know it's man-made,” Otero continued. “I just didn't know where it came from until I started Googling it.”
Otero said he found it Ars' original article about re-entry on March 8, along with posts about the event on X. That's when he contacted a local news outlet. WINK News, the CBS affiliate in southwest Florida, was first to report the damage to Otero's home. After Otero repeatedly tried to contact NASA officials, a lawyer from the Kennedy Space Center called him to hear his side of the story. NASA then sent someone to pick up the object from Naples.
