SpaceX Rocket Debris Crashes to Earth in Colorado Fireball

Colorado residents received a spectacular display on Thursday night as shooting stars rained from the sky: but not because of a meteor shower.

This collection of streaming lights falling to Earth was actually a result of a section of a SpaceX craft re-entering the Earth's atmosphere, burning up as it did so.

Photographer Mike Lewinski uploaded a picture of the shower taken from Crestone, Colorado, to spaceweather.com's Realtime Image Gallery, captioning the image: "Captured in time lapse, this is a two frame composite. It was bright enough that the foreground on my opposite facing camera is noticeably brightened."

He also posted the image to the r/Colorado subreddit.

Others around Colorado also noticed the stream of lights, local KKTV 11 News reported, with some residents even hearing a large explosion.

The debris was from a chunk of the SpaceX Dragon crew capsule Endurance, which returned four International Space Station astronauts to Earth on March 11. The capsule released a piece of disposable equipment used to store solar arrays, named the "trunk," just before it entered the Earth's atmosphere, sending it into orbit.

This piece of space junk didn't stay in orbit for long though, plunging back to Earth a mere month and a half later, as seen across Colorado.

"Overnight, the 18th Space Defense Squadron confirmed re-entry of SpaceX's Crew-5 Dragon trunk occurred on Thursday, April 27," SpaceX Media Relations said in a statement provided to 11 News. "This hardware was nominally jettisoned from the Dragon spacecraft during the return of Crew-5 astronauts from the International Space Station on March 11, 2023. NASA and SpaceX are committed to safe commercial crew operations and are working closely to improve orbital hardware demise modeling."

Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, tweeted a map of the trunk's re-entry, showing the object passing over Phoenix, Arizona, the Great Sand Dunes National Park and towards Colorado Springs.

"The trunk, object 55840, made an uncontrolled reentry last night at 0852 UTC = 0252 MDT = 0152 MST on a track from Phoenix to Colorado Springs. The reentry breakup was widely seen," he said in the tweet.

There is a huge amount of space debris orbiting the Earth as a result of decades of space operations.

"More than 15,000 satellites have been placed in Earth orbit since the first satellite, Sputnik 1, was orbited by the Soviet Union on 4 October 1957. That satellite re-entered after only three months," Mark Rigby, an adjunct research fellow for the Centre of Astrophysics at the University of Southern Queensland in Australia and past curator of the Sir Thomas Brisbane Planetarium in Brisbane, previously told Newsweek. "The number of satellites in Earth orbit has increased dramatically in recent years, due mainly to SpaceX and its Starlink communications satellites in Low Earth Orbit—now nearing 4,000."

As of March 27, the European Space Agency listed estimates of about 36,500 pieces of space debris greater than 3.9 inches across, around a million pieces between 0.4 inches and 4 inches, and more than 130 million between 0.04 and 0.4 inches across.

Orbiting objects eventually fall back to Earth as they gradually lose speed thanks to atmospheric drag. The slower the object travels, the lower it orbits, and the more drag is put on the piece of debris.

"Lower altitudes mean more drag, so this process proceeds faster and faster as space junk moves to lower altitudes, until drag becomes so large that the object re-enters," Samantha Lawler, an assistant professor of astronomy at the University of Regina in Canada, told Newsweek in February.

The re-entry of space junk can also be accelerated by solar activity, as the atmosphere is heated up by geomagnetic storms, causing increasing levels of drag on orbiting objects. A severe G4 geomagnetic storm that hit on April 23 may therefore have contributed to the re-entry of the SpaceX debris on Thursday.

Thankfully, most smaller pieces of space junk completely burn up as they enter the atmosphere, heating up because of friction with the atmosphere. However, larger chunks of debris may survive the descent, crash-landing somewhere on the Earth's surface.

"Most debris that enters Earth's atmosphere burns up harmlessly. The real concern is with large pieces such as used rocket bodies or even spacecraft that are large enough to have some of their parts survive re-entry," Wendy N. Whitman Cobb, a professor of strategy and security studies at Air University, previously told Newsweek.

"While the chances are still very good that the remains will land in the ocean, there is a non-zero chance of the debris striking somewhere on the ground," Whitman Cobb said. "When Skylab, the U.S.'s first space station program, was deorbited, some of its debris landed in Australia. More recently, some parts of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rockets have been found in Brazil. So while there isn't a high chance of debris striking people or property, it's not completely absent either."

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