Several pieces of debris from a Falcon 9 rocket made by Elon Musk's SpaceX have fallen in northwestern Poland. There are suspicions that debris also fell in western Ukraine.
Several pieces of debris from a Falcon 9 rocket made by Elon Musk's SpaceX have fallen in northwestern Poland. There are suspicions that debris also fell in western Ukraine.
At around 10:00 local time on Wednesday, Adam Borucki discovered a piece of rocket debris, resembling a charred tank measuring approximately 1.5 by 1 meter, behind his warehouse in Komorniki, Poland. Fortunately, no one was injured, and the debris only damaged a light fixture in the warehouse yard, the BBC reports .
Borucki contacted the police, who, working with the Polish space agency Polsa, determined that the unidentified object was debris from a Falcon 9 rocket.
The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is used to transport people and payloads into Earth's atmosphere. It is designed to be reusable. The rocket that created the debris was launched by SpaceX from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on February 1.
According to Polish police, a similar fragment was found in a forest near the Polish village of Wiry.
Polsa confirmed that "an uncontrolled re-entry of the second stage of the Falcon 9 rocket occurred between 04:46 and 04:48 on February 19, 2025 over Poland."
There are reports of sightings of objects in Denmark, Sweden and England.
"The debris swept over England at about 27,000 miles per hour, then parts of Scandinavia, then parts fell on eastern Europe at several hundred miles per hour," Harvard University astrophysicist Dr Jonathan McDowell told the BBC.
"So far we've been lucky and no one has been hurt, but the more we put into Earth orbit, the more likely it is that our luck will run out," he said.
Large debris has so far been confirmed in Poland, but Dr McDowell suspects that debris fell in western Ukraine, where comet-like streaks of light in the sky "were clearly visible".
