For all his faults, Elon Musk sure knows how to keep things interesting.
Yesterday, skies around the world lit up with what seems to be returning debris courtesy of Musk’s private space travel company SpaceX. Specifically, the Dragon Freedom-2 Deb, a module that launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida in September of 2024 as part of a NASA mission to bring two astronauts to the International Space Station.
Last week, the crew module of the Dragon returned to earth, bringing back four astronauts, including Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, both of whom became stuck on the ISS in June of 2024 after technical difficulties with Boeing’s Starliner turned their eight-day stay into a months-long ordeal.
But yesterday, the unmanned portion of the Dragon — assumed to be the unpressurized cargo trunk, due to publicly-tracked Dragon reentry data which closely matches reported locations of the fireballs — rained down on skies as far apart as California, Nevada, Morocco, and Australia. That caused some wild lightshows to illuminate the sky, driving curious observers to social media to speculate on the cause.
Though the exact point of reentry is uncertain, we know that the Dragon whipped across the Pacific ocean, appearing over central California and western Nevada as it screamed toward north-eastern Canada, leading to fireball sightings from Portland, Oregon to Phoenix, Arizona. From there it arched over the northern Atlantic on a trajectory roughly on a path toward Morocco, reaching mid-reentry over Cameroon, finally completing its rapid global loop somewhere around the Indian Ocean and southeastern Australia.
SpaceX and NASA have yet to release a statement on the trunk’s reentry, and no debris has been found on the ground. That might have something to do with the nature of its return: as the crew module reentered, the Dragon trunk was jettisoned and left to dawdle in orbit uncontrolled. That’s not unheard of for SpaceX, according to Harvard astronomer Jonathan McDowell, who wrote that “this is the last Dragon trunk to be intentionally left in orbit for uncontrolled reentry.”
The fiery return is driving some discourse around the near limitless freedom SpaceX has been given to rain down debris on the earth without oversight.
“Would it be fair to say that ‘most’ if not all of this trunk section will burn up in the atmosphere on reentering?” one incredulous user asked McDowell on X-formerly-Twitter. “Anything left will not contain toxic fuels or materials that could cause major harm to kids and animals?”
Earlier in February, people took to X to report random chunks of of debris from SpaceX’s Falcon 2 launch falling willy-nilly across Poland. In January 2025 alone, over 125 of Musk’s Starlink satellites fell out of the sky, prompting concerns about the consequences the equipment causes on reentry, like scattering dangerous chemical waste into the ozone layer and falling in unpredictable locations.
As Starlink becomes the dominant provider of internet access to rural populations around the globe, questions of the network’s costly upkeep — necessitating a nearly constant stream of satellite launches to keep stable — and of the man holding the reins are growing louder and louder.
Though space travel holds exciting possibilities, it goes without saying that the health and wellbeing of those of us still on the ground shouldn’t be taken for granted to make it possible.
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