SpaceX Rocket Stage Burns Up Over Europe and Crashes in Poland, While Blue Origin Debris Washes Ashore in the Bahamas
The SpaceX rocket failed to deorbit properly, and the Blue Origin debris had already landed as planned in the ocean
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A falling SpaceX rocket stage burned through European skies, and some of its pieces crash-landed in Poland. Separately, a piece of a Blue Origin rocket’s nose cone washed up on a beach in the Bahamas. Experts say these events, both occurring last week, highlight the growing threat of space debris in a world where launches are ramping up.
The SpaceX debris looked like a “fireball” blazing over Europe on its descent, with people from the United Kingdom to Germany seeing it light up across the sky. “I was wondering at first, what kind of flying objects that could be,” a German train driver who caught the event on film says in an email to CNN’s Jackie Wattles. “I was thinking of falling stars, comets, meteors or even missiles.”
While some rocket material burns up entirely when it re-enters the atmosphere, pieces of this stage hit the ground. Two chunks measuring about five feet by three feet were found near the Polish city of Poznan, reports CBS News. One of the pieces seemed to be a charred but largely intact fuel tank, which landed near a warehouse in Poland.
The debris had been part of the upper stage of the Space X Falcon 9 rocket that launched from Southern California on February 1 to carry Starlink satellites to orbit. This particular piece failed to deorbit properly, reportedly due to a propellant leak.
“It was supposed to re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere in a controlled manner and crash into the Pacific Ocean,” Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard and Smithsonian, tells BBC News’ Eve Webster. “But the engine failed. We’ve seen it orbiting Earth for the past few weeks and we were anticipating an uncontrolled re-entry … which is what people saw burning in the sky.”
The piece of the Blue Origin rocket nose cone that washed ashore in the Bahamas was part of the New Glenn spacecraft that launched on its first flight on January 16. This event, unlike the SpaceX incident, was not much of a surprise.
“Some minor debris from New Glenn’s fairing washed ashore in Abaco, Bahamas, over the weekend,” Blue Origin says in a statement to CNN. “The fairing’s landing in the sea was planned and expected. We have sent a team out to recover the pieces.”
These recent events are not alone. In January 2025, debris from a test of SpaceX’s Starship rocket landed in Turks and Caicos. Last spring, space junk from the International Space Station crashed into a home in Florida.
A growing body of research shows that the risk of falling space junk is increasing. “There is a 26 percent chance of an uncontrolled space debris re-entry in busy airspaces such as the Northeastern United States or Northern Europe each year,” Ewan Wright, lead author of a recent study on falling space debris, told Space.com’s Leonard David earlier this month.
“Eventually, someone’s going to get killed by a piece of space debris,” said Ben Fernando, a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins University who is leading a different research project on detecting space debris with seismometers, to Kasha Patel at the Washington Post in January. Space agencies say the risk of injury from such debris is extremely low, per CNN.
Space junk can also be hazardous in other ways, especially if toxic fuels are present. “It’s not that it’s (always) a death sentence to get close to one of these things,” explained The Aerospace Corporation’s Marlon Sorge in an interview with CNN last month. “Mostly they’re probably OK, but it is potentially risky. And it’s not worth people getting injured.”
