NAIROBI: Kenyan officials said Wednesday they were investigating fragments of metal, believed to be from a rocket, that crashed into a village in the country’s south.
The issue of space trash has risen in tandem with increased spatial traffic.
Kenya Space Agency (KSA) said the object, a metallic ring roughly 2.5 metres (8 feet) in diametre and weighing some 500 kilogrammes (1,100 pounds), crashed into Mukuku village, in Makueni county, on December 30 at around 3:00 pm local time (1200 GMT).
The KSA, working alongside other agencies and local authorities, “secured the area and retrieved the debris, which is now under the Agency’s custody for further investigation.”
I’m not sure what launch vehicles this could have conceivably come from - there’s not a lot of 2.5 meter rockets. Maybe it was a payload adapter?
SpaceX is known to drop shit all over the place, but yeah no idea if they have something like that. Could also just be from a plane.
As bad as SpaceX may be, the Chinese have been terrifyingly incompetent at avoiding space debris falling on people. Still, I don’t know if any of their rockets have a diameter like this.
Certainly could be from non-space activities, like you said.
Boeing glances around nervously…
Boeing: loads gun