NASA Confirms Space Station Debris Crashed Into Florida Home

It’s not every day that a piece of the International Space Station (ISS) crashes through a person’s roof, but that’s what happened to a stunned Florida resident.

NASA confirmed on Monday that the dangerous “space debris” plunged from beyond the Earth and tore through the roof of a Naples residence. After the startling incident, the object was removed and taken to the Kennedy Space Center for study.

Experts concluded it is a metal support utilized on the ISS to hold drained batteries that are being disposed of. NASA believed the component would disintegrate during reentry, but apparently it did not.

The cylindrical object weighed 1.6 pounds and measured 4 inches by 1 ½ inches. The pallet was jettisoned from the ISS in 2021, and its contents were expected to completely burn down to nothing.

One piece apparently did not follow the script.

The homeowner was on vacation when the space junk plowed through his roof and heard about the incident from his son. Alejandro Otero recalled to media outlet WINK that he cut his trip short and found that the debris ripped through his roof and destroyed his floor.

Otero explained, “It was a tremendous sound. It almost hit my son. He was two rooms over and heard it all.”

The worried father told the station that he was shaking. “I was completely in disbelief. What are the chances of something landing on my house with such force to cause so much damage? I’m super grateful that nobody got hurt.”

After the frightening incident, Otero contacted Harvard astronomer Jonathan McDowell through social media. He described the piece that ripped through the roof on the second story of his home and then damaged his flooring.

McDowell operates a website on which he tracks space debris and other manmade objects that tumble down to the planet’s surface. The region above the atmosphere is filled with tens of thousands of satellites, and when all or part of one is no longer operable, it must go somewhere.

NASA is reportedly studying the flight and trajectory of the object for a better understanding of how space debris reenters Earth’s atmosphere.