Imagine having a dense piece of metal go right through your roof and break through both floors of your home! That´s exactly what happened to a resident in Naples, Florida. But what was it? NASA was on the case!

Alejandro Otero was home when the 2-pound broke through the house, and the security camera caught the sound of the object falling through early in March. The father and son duo were stunned at what it could be, and after some research, it turned out it was space debris. NASA recouped the object and took it back to Kennedy Space Center and after analyzing it for weeks, they confirmed that it was indeed from the International Space Station.

Specifically, this dense metal object was a set of depleted batteries attached to a cargo pallet from the International Space Station. The pallet was supposed to come back to Earth in a controlled manner. Unfortunately, there were some delays, and the cargo pallet missed the trip back to Earth. NASA decided to let the batteries go in 2021 to reenter our planet unguided, and they were supposed to burn as they plunged through the atmosphere, but that didn’t happen. (Yes, without propulsion the batteries can drift in orbit for three years until aerodynamic drag pulls it into the atmosphere).

The atmosphere usually burns debris since the temperatures are extremely hot. NASA notes that the entire pallet was about the size of two refrigerators and objects this big are generally allowed to drop back to Earth on guided trajectories, often objects this big are satellites no longer in use or rockets that have completed their missions. Although they can calculate more or less the time and place where an unguided piece of debris will crash, it is not exact. The upper atmosphere poses many more questions than answers, complicating calculations more.

Yes, the federal government could eventually pay for damages. Mr. Otero can make a claim (through his insurance company and they could then forward it against the federal government under the Federal Tort Claims Act.