Originally published in Scientific American.
Samantha Lawler is an assistant professor of Astronomy at the University of Regina.
The email arrived, like a bolt from the sky, on the typical afternoon of Thursday, May 9th. The message was from a reporter asking me, an astronomer, for an interview about a farmer who had reportedly found space debris while preparing his fields for spring planting, just an hour’s drive from my home in Saskatchewan. “Yeah, right,” I said to myself as I tapped out my affirmative answer. The odds are already long for any particular place on Earth to be hit by orbital debris – so the odds of this happening practically in the backyard of someone like me who studies the matter felt astronomically low, just too remote to was true.
A quick check of my news feed proved me wrong. One of the top stories was about the impact of space debris, and even included a photo of farmer Barry Sawchuk standing next to what appeared to be the burned and battered hood of a semi-truck covered in woven carbon fiber and some slightly melted aluminum extensions. My jaw dropped in shock: The object looked exactly like debris that fell into an Australian sheep field in 2022, which US aerospace company SpaceX later admitted was part of a cargo hold for its Crew Dragon spacecraft. This “trunk” is actually the size of a small grain silo and is ejected into orbit long before the spacecraft’s atmospheric re-entry, only to naturally and chaotically re-enter itself and, presumably, burn up completely.
To confirm my hunch, I immediately e-mailed my colleague Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, which maintains perhaps the best public database of launches, re-entries and other space activities. McDowell responded within minutes, forwarding a graphic that traced the path of a SpaceX Crew Dragon payload launched from Axiom 3 The private astronaut mission that had re-entered the Canadian prairies on February 26, 2024. My guess was confirmed.
As an astronomer, I already had good reason to worry about SpaceX. The company has launched a large number of its Starlink broadband internet satellites since 2019; more than 6,000 are in orbit, and up to 42,000 are planned. As Starlink grew—along with competing plans for other satellite “mega constellations”—my telescope data and my vast prairie sky filled with bright, easily visible satellites, just as many astronomers had predicted ( including myself). Beyond this devastating light pollution, however, new research shows that atmospheric pollution is increasing from the dramatic SpaceX-dominated increase in launches and re-entries – with potentially catastrophic global effects. Aluminum oxide produced by the sublimation of satellites in the Earth’s upper atmosphere, it turns out, is a powerful and stable catalyst for chemical reactions similar to those that in the 20th century famously ate a hole in the our planet’s delicate ozone layer, which blocks radiation.
Those of us who are lucky enough to be able to escape urban light pollution present us with being bystanders to this blur of the sky; we look up, feel overwhelmed, and look away. This last situation, with the company’s activity filling my neighbors with hazardous waste, felt somewhat more personal. So I decided to step up and help hold SpaceX accountable.
Connected: Space debris from the SpaceX Dragon capsule crashed in the mountains of North Carolina. I had to go see it (video)
I got Sawchuk’s phone number from the reporter who had contacted me, and the farmer took my call from the cab of his tractor while he was busy planting. He was extremely upset that SpaceX was allowed to dump its orbital debris on his farm, he said, and had assumed the best response was to tell his story to the news media. But the initial reaction was subdued; most reporters didn’t prioritize following a rural farmer in Saskatchewan who said he found a piece of space debris. Sawchuk gave me permission to pass his phone number on to curious minds, on one condition: “I will not answer messages while I’m driving the tractor!” I started making a list of every space law and orbital debris expert I could think of to ask for advice.