A Chunk of Metal From the ISS Crashed Into a Florida House, NASA Confesses

Whoopsie.

The 1.6-pound chunk of metal that crashed through Alejandro Otero’s Naples, Florida, home in March ripped through two stories thanks to impact’s force. It came from a surprising source: The International Space Station.

NASA confirmed that a piece of a jettisoned cargo pallet made an uncontrolled reentry into Earth’s atmosphere and didn’t burn up as originally expected. Instead, debris made it through, scattering while doing so. An object made of the metal alloy Inconel hit the home, a 4-inch tall and 1.6-inch diameter piece that was once a stanchion from a NASA flight to support mounting batteries on a cargo pallet at the International Space Station.

In March 2021, NASA used a robotic arm to release the multi-ton Exposed Pallet 9 containing nickel hydride batteries from the space station after an upgrade to the station the year before. The total mass of the released hardware was roughly 5,800 pounds.

“The hardware was expected to fully burn up during entry through Earth’s atmosphere on March 8, 2024,” NASA says in a statement. “However, a piece of hardware survived reentry.”

Prior to the debris reaching the Earth’s atmosphere, Jonathan McDowell, part of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, took to social media to predict that roughly half a ton worth of fragments would “likely hit the Earth’s surface.” Otero added to McDowell’s social media post to say it was his house that saw a fragment rip “through the roof” and then two floors, narrowly missing his son during the ordeal.

NASA collected the item and following an assessment that included a materials analysis, believes it to be a stanchion that NASA flight support used to mount the batteries on the cargo pallet. The length of a typical popsicle stick and as round as a small can, the nickel-chromium superalloy known for its ability to withstand extremely high temperatures was far more threatening than its size. At 1.6 pounds, it was hurtling from space at an unknown speed.

In 2021, the tossing of the multi-ton Exposed Pallet 9 represented the largest item ever released from the station headed toward uncontrolled reentry. NASA knew it was sending nearly three tons of debris uncontrolled back to Earth but didn’t think any of it would actually make it through.

“NASA specialists use engineering models to estimate how objects heat up and break apart during atmospheric reentry,” the agency says.

That all changed this March when the warning came out from Germany’s Federal Office for Civil Protection and Disaster Relief, National Warning Center 1 that not only would this space object possibly fragment, but there could be a sonic boom. The modeling had failed. “These models require detailed input parameters and are regularly updated when debris is found to have survived atmospheric reentry to the ground,” NASA says.

An update is apparently needed.

Tim Newcomb is a journalist based in the Pacific Northwest. He covers stadiums, sneakers, gear, infrastructure, and more for a variety of publications, including Popular Mechanics. His favorite interviews have included sit-downs with Roger Federer in Switzerland, Kobe Bryant in Los Angeles, and Tinker Hatfield in Portland.

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