SPACEX DOES NOT CARE WHO THEY KILL WITH THEIR TECH…AS LONG AS ELON MUSK GETS HIS EGO TRIP AND SPACEX MASS SURVEILLANCE SPY SATELLITES GET ON WITH SPYING
A MYSTERIOUS and “deadly” space object plummeted from the sky to land in the canola field of an unsuspecting farmer in Canada.
Barry Sawchuk was driving around with his son when they came across the webbed hunk of metal – measuring 6.5ft wide and clocking in at 88lb.
The pair were “checking fields to start seeding” near Ituna – a small town in Saskatchewan, Canada – when the space junk appeared.
They thought the bizarre charred chunk of fibres and metal was rubbish at first.
Barry told Canadian broadcaster CBC: “Originally, we just thought it was garbage until we got closer.”
But upon closer inspection, the dad said he knew “it was space junk right away” and “everybody had a chuckle over it”.
An expert later warned the bizarre object could have proved fatal when it fell from the sky.
Barry said the multiple layers of charred composite fibres and webbing led him to believe it was space debris.
“We came across this object. We thought originally it was just garbage,” he said.
“But I had no idea. I don’t build spaceships for a living. I farm.”
A group of astronomy experts started to dig to find the source of the junk which had seemingly appeared from nowhere.
They concluded that the charred hunk of metal belonged to a rocket from Elon Musk‘s SpaceX.
Samantha Lawler from the University of Regina said similar objects have recently been found in Australia and the US – with one smashing the roof of a Florida home.
She said: “It’s really just luck. If that had hit in the middle of Regina or, yeah, New York City, it very easily could have killed someone.”
The expert added that space launches and rocket re-entries have become way more common in 2024 – and therefore the risk of deaths due to such accidents has drastically increased.
“The aggregate effects of all of these satellites and all of these re-entries need to be considered more carefully. This will be tested in the very near future. It’s really unfortunate how this is evolving,” she added.
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.
It comes after another object believed to be from the International Space Station (ISS) fell into a Florida home.
Alejandro Otero said the cylindrical object crashed two floors deep into his house and almost hit his son.
The chunk of debris is thought to be from the massive EP-9 equipment pallet that was jettisoned from the ISS for an uncontrolled landing over Earth in early March.
Astronomer Jonathan McDowell, who roughly tracked the reentry of the debris, initially said the EP-9 equipment pallet reentered on March 8 at 7:29pm UTC over the Gulf of Mexico between Cancun and Cuba.
However, Otero claims the estimations were wrong, having captured the sound of the crash on his Google Nest security cameras.
“Looks like one of those pieces missed Ft Myers and landed in my house in Naples,” Otero wrote in a tweet to McDowell.
“Tore through the roof and went through two floors. Almost hit my son.”
Experts say they’ve identified ‘hairy UFO’ that crash landed in North Carolina
- READ MORE: Nine never-before-seen UFOs over California, Utah and Nevada
Space experts believe they have identified the bizarre ‘UFO‘ debris discovered by a North Carolina groundskeeper and his coworker at a luxury campsite.
Justin Clontz found the three-foot-wide panel, fuzzed with burnt and frayed carbon fibers, in the middle of a trail in the town of Canton last week.
And now an astronomer has told DailyMail.com that the mangled metal is likely pieces of a storage trunk from one of SpaceX‘s reusable Cargo Dragon spacecraft.
‘The debris matches the expected location of these reentries,’ Smithsonian astrophysicist Dr Jonathan McDowell told DailyMail.com, adding that he was ‘very confident’ in this assessment.
The charred black, metal object — so heavy that witnesses had to drag it with a riding mower — resembles two pieces of crash debris from Canada‘s Saskatchewan province and Numbla Vale, Australia both now known to be from SpaceX Dragons.
Astronomer Dr Jonathan McDowell has told DailyMail.com that the bizarre ‘UFO’ crash debris discovered by a North Carolina groundskeeper at a luxury campsite has been determined to be pieces of a storage trunk from one of SpaceX ‘s reusable Cargo Dragon spacecraft (above)
Justin Clontz (above) was working grounds maintenance at Glamping Collective, a luxury campsite in Haywood County, North Carolina when he made the bewildering discovery. he had to tow the ‘UFO’ out of the area with a riding lawnmower because it was so massive and heavy
‘We have coincidence in time and place. They look similar to each other and to the Australia debris which is confirmed to come from a Dragon trunk,’ Dr McDowell said.
Clontz was working on’The risk to life and property is fairly small – because the Earth is a big target and is mostly not covered with people – but it’s not tiny,’ Dr McDowell wrote via email about the SpaceX crash grounds maintenance at Glamping Collective, a luxury campsite in Haywood County, when he made the eerie discovery.
The career groundskeeper and landscaper told local news he was ‘just shocked as to what it was,’ adding: ‘It’s once in a lifetime, you know, it don’t happen every day.’
The UFO-like debris’ carbon fiber looked almost like some kind of weird fur, as initial reports described the now very likely identified mystery object.
‘We don’t know what it is,’ Clontz told local news earlier this month. ‘We just know that it’s not from up here.’
Although this piece of SpaceX debris fell safely about a half-mile down a remote trail on Glamping’s property, Dr McDowell noted that both governmental and private space programs have become dangerously lax with their space junk in recent years.
Although this piece of SpaceX debris fell safely about a half-mile down a remote forest trail, Dr McDowell noted that both governmental and private space programs have become notably lax with their space junk in recent years. Above, the open trunk of a SpaceX Cargo Dragon craft
SpaceX’s Dragon ‘trunk’ has storage space of over 350 cubic-feet internally, with an extender option that expands its capacity to over 1200 cubic-feet of storage space. This cargo container comes with mounted radiators that help it regulate the temperature of sensitive items
‘The risk to life and property is fairly small — because the Earth is a big target and is mostly not covered with people — but it’s not tiny,’ Dr McDowell wrote via email.
‘We have seen some close shaves,’ he said.
Dr McDowell’s work, which involves collecting and analyzing data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray telescope observatory and other space-based astronomy platforms, often includes paying some attention to space traffic in Earth’s orbit.
‘The government is also taking unwarranted risks,’ noted Dr McDowell, who publishes a monthly newsletter on space launches, ‘as shown by the incident in Florida earlier this year when a bit of ISS came through the roof of someone’s house.’
That incident, this March, involved a 5,800-pound battery pallet plunging into a Florida home. The heavy metal object was later confirmed to have been discarded by the International Space Station (ISS) in 2021.
Dr McDowell’s work, which has involved NASA’s Chandra X-ray telescope observatory and other space-based astronomy platforms, often includes paying some attention to the space traffic in Earth’s orbit. Above, another close-up of the SpaceX debris in North Carolina
Naples homeowner Alejandro Otero was on vacation when he received a call from his son, saying he heard a ‘tremendous sound’ and there were gaping holes in the ceiling and floor. Otero’s son reportedly told him that whatever fell almost hit him.
SpaceX has not yet confirmed whether the object found in Canada earlier this year, or the object found in North Carolina, were debris from their spacecraft.
But, ground tracking of the SpaceX Dragon ‘trunk’ that made its re-entry this February would indicate that both of these crash debris objects came from the trunk as it burned up in the hot friction of its descent back towards Earth.
Dr McDowell told Space.com that the most likely sites for debris from this descent could include US states from Tennessee through Virginia and West Virginia, but North Carolina was certainly within the realm of possibility.
Clontz had to improvise to tow this apparent hull panel from the SpaceX Dragon’s trunk out of off the trail because it was so massive: ‘I just tied a rope to it and drug it out with a lawn mower’
Above, more detail from the futuristic SpaceX trunk panel, fuzzed with burnt and frayed carbon fibers, bolted between heavy metal plates
SpaceX’s Dragon ‘trunk’ has storage space of over 350 cubic-feet internally, with an extender option that expands its capacity to over 1200 cubic-feet.
This cargo container comes with mounted radiators — electrical and fluid connections that allow it to regulate its storage space’s internal temperature to accommodate a variety of sensitive payloads, including small satellites that can be released in orbit.
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Clontz had to improvise to tow this apparent cargo hull panel from the SpaceX Dragon’s trunk out of his trail area, just because it was so massive.
‘I just tied a rope to it and drug it out with a lawn mower,’ as Clontz explained to WLOS.
He added that the ‘UFO’ had landed perfectly in the middle of the trail and that none of the trees or leaves looked like they had caught fire in the crash.
Nobody had even heard the object land, he told reporters, which surprised him, given its size and weight.
‘It’s a one in a million chance that it lands, especially if it landed somewhere off the trail in the woods you’d have never found it,’ he told the local news team, ‘but it just happened to land on the trail.’
