On March 8th, 2024, 19-year-old Daniel Otero was alone at home in his family’s house in Naples, Florida when the walls began to shake. He first thought that the town, about 40 miles south of Fort Myers, may have been hit by an earthquake. But when he set out to inspect the house, he found a small hole in the ceiling of one of the rooms and a matching fracture in the floor below. It was clear that something had fallen through the roof. The sheriff’s department later found an odd projectile under the floorboards — a partially melted metallic cylinder only about 10 centimeters long.

The fragment was later identified as a piece of space debris ejected from the International Space Station that, contrary to NASA’s expectations, failed to burn up in the atmosphere. The family is now asking NASA to pay $80,000 in damages including emotional distress, non-insured property damage loss, business interruption damages and the cost of assistance from third parties. 

The resolution of the claim — the first of its kind — will set a precedent for how such cases are handled in the future. Chances of being struck by a piece of space debris are still extremely low — one in trillions — but reports of fragments of orbital junk landing near inhabited areas have become more frequent in recent years. Only two months after the Florida incident, a glamping company in North Carolina found a partially burned disposable support structure from SpaceX Dragon crew capsule on its property. A similar piece of charcoaled junk was found in a field in Canada the same month.

The rare occurrence seems to have landed the Otero family in a legal loophole. While many consider this event to be the most serious space debris hit since a piece from the disintegrated Space Shuttle Columbia fell through the roof of a dentist’s office in Texas in 2003, the incident is not covered by the Convention on International Liability for Damage Caused by Space Objects adopted by the United Nations’ member states in 1972. According to the Convention, a launching state is “absolutely liable to pay compensation for damage caused by its space objects on the surface of the Earth or to aircraft, and liable for damage due to its faults in space.” 

However, as Christopher Johnson, the Director of Legal Affairs and Space Law at the Secure World Foundation, an NGO focused on space sustainability, told Supercluster, the Convention “does not apply where the national citizens of a launching state suffer damages caused by that state.”

In this case, the piece of debris was a NASA-owned support structure ejected from the space station in 2021 together with a batch of used nickel-hydride batteries. If the Otero’s house was in Mexico or up north in Canada, the U.S. government would have to compensate the family without protest. 

Instead, the Otero family’s claim, filed through the legal firm Cranfill Sumner, calls upon the Federal Torts Claim Act (FTCA) claiming negligence on NASA’s part. 

FTCA, in place since 1946, provides a legal framework for individuals to claim compensations for personal injury, death, or property damage caused by negligence or wrongful omission by an employee of the federal government.

The North Carolina-head-quartered firm, however, calls out NASA in a statement on its website for not having an immediate compensation framework available for domestic victims while being “absolutely liable” for international damage.

“We have asked NASA not to apply a different standard towards U.S. citizens or residents, but instead to take care of the Oteros and make them whole,” Mica Nguyen Worthy, a partner at Cranfill Sumner’s Charlotte office, said in the statement. “Here, the U.S. government, through NASA, has an opportunity to set the standard or ‘set a precedent’ as to what responsible, safe, and sustainable space operations ought to look like. If NASA were to take the position that the Oteros’ claims should be paid in full, it would send a strong signal to both other governments and private industries that such victims should be compensated regardless of fault.”

The agency now has six months to respond to the family’s claims. Worthy told Supercluster in an email that if the case is not resolved “to the Oteros’ satisfaction,” the family might consider filing “a potential lawsuit”. She, however, added that “NASA has been professional” throughout the process.

“We have been engaged in dialogue with NASA’s legal counsel and intend to work through the issues together as they are unprecedented,” Worthy said. 

NASA refused to comment on the case for Supercluster, saying that “it would not be appropriate to comment on a pending claim.”

Over 300 metric tons of defunct satellites, used rocket stages, objects thrown out of the space station and various collision fragments enter Earth’s atmosphere every year. That’s only about 2% of the annual mass of natural meteorites that cross paths with the planet. The vast majority of both — natural and human-made objects — burns up in the atmosphere. Only larger objects occasionally make it to the ground. But experts think that the amount of space debris making it all the way down will grow in the future. 

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) released a report last year, which estimates that a piece of debris could injure or kill someone every two years if plans to deploy large satellite mega-constellations are completed based on the most ambitious plans. SpaceX Starlink, OneWeb, Amazon Project Kuiper, and Chinese ventures G60 and GuoWang have similar visions of thousands to tens of thousands of satellites.

Companies behind those mega-constellations intend to replace satellites about every five years with newer, more capable models. The old spacecraft will then be taken from orbit using residual propellent and sent into the atmosphere to burn up. Getting rid of old space stuff this way is a preferred option of the space community as it prevents junk from cluttering orbits for decades, threatening other spacecraft with collisions. On the downside, it means that within a decade, the amount of re-entering satellite mass could increase ten-fold and with it the percentage of objects surviving re-entry.

Space historian and astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell, who tracks satellite re-entries globally, told Supercluster that no “good statistics” are available of the proportion of space junk that reaches the ground but that “the frequency of reports” of debris landing in inhabited areas “has been increasing.”

“I don't think it's a serious problem yet, but it is something to worry about,” McDowell said. “We have been lucky that no one has been hurt to date, but that luck will run out eventually.”

The 19-year-old Daniel Otero was certainly the lucky one. According to available reports, he had been enjoying a relaxed afternoon only a few rooms away from the point where the debris pierced through the house. His father Alejandro rushed home after learning about the incident. In addition to concerns about the damaged roof, the family also worried the odd metallic projectile could be toxic. 

To identify the owner didn’t take long. Space experts at that time had been tracking the re-entry of a 2,630-kilogram pellet of used batteries that astronauts had sent afloat from the International Space Station three years prior. It took the junk three years to spiral down from the space station’s orbit at 400 kilometers above Earth. NASA had expected the junk to burn up completely above the Gulf of Mexico.

A closer inspection at Kennedy Space Center later confirmed the 700-gram space shrapnel was piece of the pellet’s support structure — a stanchion made of the metal alloy Inconel, a nickel-chromium-based superalloy used in extreme environments under high temperature.

Johnson said the incident brings into question the methods NASA uses to assess the risk of space debris surviving re-entry. Operators can guide old satellites that are still under control to re-enter over remote ocean areas. Space junk that is completely dead, however, can only be monitored. NASA, Johnson added, will now have to demonstrate that it takes the problem here at home as seriously as it does abroad.

“It can be viewed as setting some level for the 'standard of care' for how states behave on orbit, and especially in how they dispose of their refuse,” Johnson said. “On the international level, the U.S. is a major proponent and advocate of the UN Long-term Sustainability Guidelines, which call on states to take measures to address risks associated with uncontrolled re-entry.”

Worthy added: “My clients are seeking adequate compensation to account for the stress and impact that this event had on their lives. They are grateful that no one sustained physical injuries from this incident, but a ‘near miss’ situation such as this could have been catastrophic. If the debris had hit a few feet in another direction, there could have been serious injury or a fatality.”

According to the European Space Agency, some 12,540 satellites currently orbit the Earth. Only 9,800 of them are operational. In addition to that, space sustainability experts track about 35,670 fragments of debris down to the size of 10 centimeters. Overall, more than 12,400 metric ton of stuff hurtles in Earth’s orbits.