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A half-ton piece of space junk crashed into a Kenyan village this week. Initial reports from the Kenya Space Agency were unclear on where it came from or how it ended up there.
All the Kenya Space Agency (KSA), which has taken custody of the object since it crashed into the remote village of Mukuku, has said so far is that it is a “fragment of a space object.” Some fragment… the eight feet in diameter metal ring reportedly weighs more than 1,100 pounds.
“I was looking after my cow and I heard a loud bang,” Joseph Mutua, a resident of Mukuku village, located in the southern county of Makueni, told Kenyan news station NTV. “I could not see any smoke in the clouds. I went by the roadside to check if there was any car accident, but there wasn’t any collision.”
“If the object fell on a homestead, it would have been catastrophic,” Mutua added. “We didn’t know if it was a bomb or whatever it was and it fell here.”
According to the New York Times, the Kenya Space Agency claimed the space debris is junk left over from six decades of space exploration and numerous recent commercial rocket launches.
“Such objects are usually designed to burn up as they re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere or to fall over unoccupied areas, such as the oceans,” the space agency said.
Major Aloyce Were of the KSA said authorities were assessing the of the damage to the area, any residents and their livestock, as well as analyzing the object and working to determine where it came from. Were added, “Space is no longer as safe as we used to know it.”
This past April, the owner of a home in Naples, Florida made the news when a piece of debris from the International Space Station ripped through the roof and two floors of their house. They ended up filing an unprecedented lawsuit against NASA over the damage caused by the space junk.
In 2019, the European Space Agency reported there was over 750,000 pieces of space debris currently orbiting Earth.
At that time, Ralph Dinsley, the founder and executive director of aerospace and defense company Northern Space and Security LTD, said about all of the space debris, “We could have a major space junk event that will mean that we can’t launch beyond low-Earth orbit and we trap ourselves on Earth. The simplest event is that it will slow down how we do space exploration.” He left out the part where stuff from space just starts falling on us.