Space debris landing on Earth have sparked safety concerns on the ground about where it is going to land. In February, an upper stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket was breaking up as it made re-entry over Europe and debris scattered across multiple locations in western Poland. The European Space Agency believes up to 200 tons of space hardware re-enters the earth’s atmosphere uncontrolled every year.
As space launch traffic reaches all time highs, WSJ spoke with space industry experts, who explain whether uncontrolled re-entries could be an accident waiting to happen.
Chapters:
0:00 Space debris’s record numbers
0:39 Incident in Poland
1:28 The danger
3:15 Incident in Florida
4:53 What survives upon re-entry
5:59 Crowded space and orbital decay
6:53 China
7:39 Potential solutions
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