SpaceX has a huge trash problem

SpaceX is having a moment right now, but not the kind of one they want.

They’re having a serious problem with space junk crashing back to Earth. Let’s dive into what’s been going on with this debris, why it’s happening, and the larger issues surrounding space junk right now.

Space junk is generally a huge problem. Whether it’s crashing back to Earth, inactive debris cluttering up low Earth orbit, or even one of the many active satellites wreaking havoc on ground based astronomy (remember SpaceX Starlink satellites photobombing my photo of the northern lights?), we’re having a lot of problems with space junk, and it’s just getting worse.

And I want to emphasize — this is NOT a problem that is limited to SpaceX. This issue is widespread across the space industry, commercial space, military space, and civil space, and it affects EVERYONE, but because SpaceX is launching the most satellites and is the most active launch company right now, the focus is squarely on them.

SpaceX also gets a lot of attention here, because environmental issues seem to be low on their priority list. A recent investigative article in the New York Times dove into the environmental damage from Starship launches on the wildlife areas around SpaceX’s Boca Chica, Texas launch site, and another recent study showed that SpaceX’s Starlink satellites may actually be harming the ozone layer. Interesting, considering the reason the company’s CEO is emphasizing Mars colonization is because of climate change damage done to Earth.

SpaceX is a company that generally tries to move as quickly as possible, and they have not made environmental issues a priority. Their emphasis on reusability isn’t about being environmentally friendly, but about bringing down the costs of launching to space.

So, let’s talk specifically about this trash problem.

On two separate occasions in the last few weeks, debris from a SpaceX Dragon capsule has ended up in parts of North America. It’s honestly just dumb luck they didn’t hit anything or harm anyone.

(You might remember a report I did on a piece of ISS space trash hitting someone’s home — that was not SpaceX, that was from a JAXA pallet released by NASA and the International Space Station.)

The North Carolina piece of debris

On May 22, 2024, a landscaper discovered a piece of junk about a half mile up a hiking trail owned and maintained by a company called The Glamping Collective, which is located about 20 minutes west of Asheville in the mountains of North Carolina. It was pretty random that the debris was even discovered — had it not landed ON a hiking trail, it’s very possible it would have gone undiscovered.

The Glamping Collective didn’t respond to my inquiries about the debris, but according to an article in The New York Times, SpaceX hasn’t reached out about it at all. The company is keeping the junk and actually is currently advertising it on their website.

Astronomer Jonathan McDowell, who tracks active satellites and space debris, tracked this to the trunk from the re-entry of SpaceX’s Crew-7 mission. The capsuled de-orbited on May 21. (There was also a smaller piece found in North Carolina from this same trunk that actually hit someone’s house but didn’t cause damage, as far as I can tell.)

The other situation is even more interesting because it involves cross-border issues.

Moving onto Saskatchewan, Canada

Multiple pieces of debris landed on a farm in Saskatchewan, which is rural Canada. If you’re on Mastodon at all, Sam Lawler, who is a professor of astronomy and is an expert (and my go-to person) when talking about anything space junk or satellite pollution, has an amazing thread on this entire saga. She also wrote about it for Scientific American. By chance, the junk landed about an hour away from her farm.

The Canada piece of debris was from the Axiom-3 mission, a private crewed mission to the ISS. That de-orbited on February 26, and it’s not clear when it hit the farm, but it was discovered on April 28. This farm is about 10,000 acres in size, and the biggest piece of debris weighs in at around 100 lbs. According to Sam, who’s on the right of this picture with the farmer on the left, it’s about 4 feet by 6 feet.

Here’s another piece that 9 feet long and weighed about 80 lbs. Sam estimates that in total, the discovered debris weighed about 250 lbs (113 kg).

Jonathan McDowell tracked this junk as well — here’s the re-entry track of the Crew Dragon trunk and this is approximately where the pieces of debris landed.

The interesting thing here is the legal issues on responsibility. Technically, according to the Outer Space Treaty, the government where the company is based is responsible for their activities in space. Governments are also liable for damage back on Earth — but what if there’s no damage?

That means that for any SpaceX objects in orbit, the U.S. government is the responsible party. But who is responsible if it falls back to Earth??? The treaty doesn’t explicitly cover that — it’s from 1967. But considering the U.S. government was responsible for it in space, it feels they should be responsible if it falls back to Earth as well, and this should be a thing handled by governments — and in this case, whether it’s in space or on Earth, it’s the property of SpaceX. It shouldn’t be handled by an astronomer reaching out to a farmer, which is basically what ended up happening. Sam did great work here, but this wasn’t her job, and shouldn’t have been her responsibility.

What ended up happening here is that a representative from SpaceX likely saw the interviews (or someone contacted them after seeing Sam speak about it) and reached out to the farmer to ask for the debris back. Because SpaceX still technically owns the debris, the farmer was legally required to surrender it at that point — but he was able to ask for compensation. In this case, he asked for a donation to the local skating rink and got it — $5,000 per piece (and they found three pieces), which seems small considering this junk could have easily killed someone.

SpaceX apparently sent someone in a U-Haul to pick up the debris, and that’s the end of that saga. But according to Jonathan McDowell, there have been 23 Crew Dragon trunk re-entries total. 18 were either over water or in inaccessible places, which leaves 5 over inhabited places. There has been debris discovered from 4 of the 5 (pieces of debris were found in Colorado Springs, CO, and in Australia back in 2022). This is a big deal. As I mentioned, this could have easily injured or killed someone, considering the size, weight, and speed it hits at.

What happens next? The deal with the Crew Dragon trunk

Well, it’s important to note that SpaceX has not confirmed that these pieces of debris are from their spacecraft to any reporter. I reached out to them and unsurprisingly received no response.

But NASA did respond to my inquiry, and confirmed that SpaceX had confirmed to them that these pieces were from SpaceX missions.

These are both Crew Dragon missions, and the debris is specifically from the vehicle’s trunk.

If you’re familiar with capsule spacecraft generally, most of them have the crew capsule and then a service module, which is where the main propulsion is located as well as support systems for the mission. Before re-entry, the crew jettisons the service module, and it burns up in the atmosphere. Or at least, it’s supposed to.

As a sidenote, this is part of why the Boeing Starliner crewed flight test mission has been extended so long — the problems they’re studying are in the service module, and they need to know how to fix them before they can come back because the service module doesn’t return to Earth.

You can think of the Crew Dragon trunk as similar to a service module — but it’s basically empty. It has no engines, it’s just an unpressurized cargo container that supports the spacecraft during launch. Half of it is covered in solar panels for power generation as well.

Crew Dragon autonomously undocks from the ISS and uses a departure burn to move away from the Space Station. It then performs engine maneuvers to lower its orbit and position it properly. Once the spacecraft is in place, it jettisons the trunk, then conducts the deorbit burn that lasts around 12 minutes, and then the capsule re-enters, parachutes deploy, and it splashes down.

The trunk makes it way down much more slowly, in an uncontrolled re-entry, and it’s SUPPOSED to fully burn up in the atmosphere.

Clearly, the trunk isn’t burning up the way it’s supposed to

What NASA said to me is that during the design and testing phase, the trunk was evaluated to fully break up and incinerate. (As an aside, I’d love to see those reports, but they aren’t publicly available and NASA didn’t respond to my request to see them, which is not surprising, because these spacecraft are the property of SpaceX and not NASA.)

Because SpaceX did pick up the debris in Canada, they will now evaluate it to figure out why exactly the trunk isn’t fully disintegrating during re-entry. The Dragon trunk is made of a composite material that was enhanced during the development of Dragon 2 — Crew Dragon and the Dragon cargo module are just two variants of Dragon 2, which first launched on an uncrewed test flight in 2019. Dragon 1 was retired in 2020. That composite material is a thermal protection system made of carbon fiber, and it’s likely that sturdy composition that is making it resist burning up in the atmosphere.

NASA and SpaceX are looking at all options to mitigate this trunk debris situation. According to an interview with Commercial Crew program manager Steve Stitch over at NASA, as reported by Jeff Foust at SpaceNews, they’re looking at changing the de-orbit procedures for now. The trouble is it would involve doing the deorbit burn while the trunk was still attached, and then jettisoning the trunk after that. There are still challenges to work out here, though, including needing extra propellant to do the burn with the trunk attached, and ensuring proper positioning of the trunk when it’s jettisoned.

It’s important to note though — this is aimed at ensuring the debris falls into the ocean, and not any populated areas. This doesn’t fix the junk issue in and of itself. For that they’d have to redesign the trunk most likely.

https://youtu.be/Ndqzl6zUw4QI’ll continue to follow this story and see what happens, but for now, all I can say is that we need to do better, both by humans and respect for space. Space junk is becoming a bigger and bigger problem, and we need better management and better regulations to preserve our night skies for future generations and to make sure we’re not cluttering up Earth orbit with junk. This is just one example of a much, much larger problem that we need to address.