Who Pays For The Environmental Damage When A Starship Falls In My Backyard? – CleanTechnica

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Hubby and I were sitting at our dining room table, eating our dinner and watching the sun dip over the Intracoastal Waterway. Then a ball appeared in the sky, heading west to east — a swirling mass of vapors with what looked like a nebula around it. Gold sparks were glinting at its edges. I decided it was the residue from a meteor. Hubby said it was space junk.

I grabbed my binoculars and relocated the fiery ring as it passed in front of a nearby building. There were at least a dozen golden lights leading its path, like straight pins aflame, and behind the piercing light show were streams of misty smoke. The churning, cloudy mass was on a downward angular trajectory, traveling at an amazing speed over the beach and out to the ocean. Then it hit the ocean’s surface about five miles out and disappeared.

I immediately reached out to my stargazer friend, who brainstormed with me and determined that what I saw must have been space junk. With several minutes he learned that Starship — the huge spacecraft that Elon Musk says will one day take people to Mars — exploded in space, with debris falling across Florida and causing air travel halts up and down the eastern seaboard. The rocket had lifted off around 6:30 p.m. ET from the SpaceX site known as Starbase at the southern tip of Texas near the city of Brownsville.

Meteorologist Noah Bergren explained that space debris like the Starship fragments heats up tremendously upon falling back through Earth’s atmosphere and can reach several thousand degrees °F, “and fall at speeds several hundred MPH when striking the ground or ocean surface.” The Starship rocket system is the largest ever built. “It is MASSIVE,” exclaims Bergren. “The entire craft with the booster is nearly 400 feet (133 yards) tall. So, nearly 1.5 football fields tall!”

I’ve been studying the wave and current patterns off the beach today, and I have concluded that some of the space junk from Starship is likely to wash up on our shore — maybe not today or this week, but it will happen. Will the world’s wealthiest man pay for the cleanup? What about damage to marine animals and ecosystems? Why are Musk and Jeff Bezos and other über Magalomanics allowed to test out their space whims without being held accountable for the consequences of such failed research?

I’m not the first one to pose such a question about obligations that accompany space flights. Vijay Iyer, writing for The Federation of American Scientists, explains that space debris collision with an object the size of even a nickel can cause catastrophic damage. Due to the speed at which objects move — around 17,000 mph — the impact of even a small golf ball-sized object can cause significant damage or completely shatter existing infrastructure.

My stargazing friend mentioned last night how lucky we all were that the path of the Starship falling debris was just high enough to miss our densely populated beach community.

I hadn’t realized that, of the 55,000 pieces of debris that can be tracked, more than 27,000 objects, like spent rocket boosters, active satellites, and dead satellites, are monitored by the Department of Defense’s global Space Surveillance Network (SSN). Space companies and agencies are generally responsible for the end of life of their satellites and rockets. For some, that means putting them in a high orbit graveyard around Earth. Others use their craft’s remaining fuel to do a controlled de-orbit.

NASA indicates that space debris remediation has minimal financial drawbacks, with a high debris-cleaning impact within a few years. Scientists have identified two scenarios to cleaning up space debris still in orbit:

1. Prioritizing large debris breakdown and debris removal — getting rid of the top 50 largest and most-concerning objects in space
2. Targeting small debris removal — eliminating 100,000 pieces of debris from 1–10 cm in size

But who cleans up space debris that gets dumped on the Earth, like we experienced last night in Florida? With thousands of satellites up into Earth’s atmosphere, little is being done about this re-entry issue. And even if we stop launching today, there would still be space debris that comes down over the next century.

Yes, there is an international treaty that says if space junk falls to Earth and causes damage or injury, whichever country that launched the debris is responsible, without anyone having to prove that negligence caused it. However, it doesn’t apply when a country’s own space object causes harm to its own citizens.

So the Starship debris that fell off our beach will get ingested by endangered sea turtles, wash up on our shore, and cut kids’ feet — and it’s on us to deal with it.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk has grown SpaceX revenue by upwards of 500% in five years, in great part due to the success of its satellite internet service Starlink.

There are many instances of SpaceX debris that has fallen from the sky.

• In March 2022, a couple living in the rural town of São Mateus do Sul, Brazil were shocked to find a 600-kilogram piece of smashed metal lying just 50 meters from their home.
• Four months later, two Australian sheep farmers found a strange, black object that appeared to have embedded itself in a field.
• In May 2024, a farmer in Ituna, Saskatchewan, found a similar object in his wheat field.
• During a launch in February, a Falcon 9 upper stage failed to execute the usual engine burn to ensure that the rocket’s remains would splash down in the ocean. Instead, it remained in orbit, eventually re-entering the atmosphere 18 days later, with pieces landing in Poland.

The New York Times reports that the current Starship incident was its second consecutive test flight where the upper-stage spacecraft malfunctioned. It started spinning out of control after several engines went out and then lost contact with mission control. Starship’s enormous booster repeated its previous success of returning to the launchpad. However, just as upper stage engines were about to shut off, several of them malfunctioned.

Video from the rocket showed a tumbling view of Earth and space until it cut off.

SpaceX posted a statement on its website. “Prior to the end of the ascent burn, an energetic event in the aft portion of Starship resulted in the loss of several Raptor engines. This in turn led to a loss of attitude control and ultimately a loss of communications with Starship.”

Meanwhile, the FAA is trying to work around conflicts of interest with Musk and SpaceX as he heads/advises/peeks in on the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).