A Man in Poland Reported a Tank That Had Fallen From the Sky. It Was Actually a SpaceX Rocket That Reentered Uncontrollably Over Europe

The second stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket reentered Earth’s atmosphere uncontrollably over Europe on Tuesday night, creating a spectacular display as it burned up. However, part of the rocket didn’t disintegrate upon reentry. In fact, debris was found in Poland on Wednesday morning.

A nighttime spectacle. People in Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Poland reported witnessing the rocket’s reentry. Videos of the metallic debris burning dramatically in the night sky soon began circulating on social media.

Atmospheric reentries have become a familiar sight due to the frequent falls of Starlink satellites. However, this incident involved something much larger: the second stage of a Falcon 9 rocket, measuring 45 feet in length and 12 feet in diameter.

A tank fell in Poland. It’s unusual for a SpaceX rocket to reenter uncontrolled. It’s even rarer for this kind of event to occur in a densely populated area like Europe. This time, the rocket didn’t completely disintegrate. Some debris landed on the outskirts of Poznań, a city with a population of around half a million in Western Poland.

At 9:20 a.m. local time, an employee of an industrial plant reported to the police that an object had fallen from the sky onto the premises. The object turned out to be a carbon fiber-coated pressure vessel, identical to one that had appeared on a farm in Washington in 2021.

This was the trajectory of the Falcon 9’s re-entry over Europe, according to astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell.

During the previous incident in Washington, it was confirmed that the object was a helium tank from the second stage of a Falcon 9 rocket. This nearly five-foot-long object is pressurized to 400 bar and designed to withstand extreme conditions, including reentry into the atmosphere. In the Washington farm, it left a crater 4 inches deep in the ground, highlighting the speed at which it reentered.

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A Family of Farmers Found Carbon Fiber Debris on Their Land. It Turned Out to Be Part of a Spacecraft

A rocket failure. SpaceX launches the most rockets, typically two to three per week. Does this mean we’ll have to wear helmets while on the street? Not necessarily. Like most rockets (with notable exceptions from China), the Falcon 9’s second stage reserves fuel to deorbit over the ocean, allowing the engine to restart once the payload is deployed.

In this case, the debris that fell over Europe was due to a technical failure during the Starlink 11-4 mission launch, which failed to reignite its engine for deorbit on Feb. 2. The rocket continued to orbit the Earth until it eventually reentered the atmosphere naturally due to gravity. This event occurred on Feb. 18 at 10:43 p.m. ET / 7:43 p.m. PT, on a trajectory that extended over Ukraine, coinciding with the debris found in Poland.

Image | SpaceX

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