Have you noticed the uptick in reports of human-made objects falling to Earth from space lately? For example:

• In May 2025, Soviet space probe Kosmos 482 fell back to Earth in the Indian Ocean 53 years after commencing its mission for Venus.1
• In February 2025, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket experienced an uncontrolled re-entry over Eng- land and parts of Scandinavia before ultimately crashing in Poland.2
• In December 2024, a 500-kilogram (1,102-pound) metallic ring measuring approximately 2.5 metres (8.2 feet) in diameter landed in Kenya.3
• In March 2024, a battery that NASA released from the International Space Station crashed through the roof of a home in Naples, Florida.4

Falling space objects is not a new phenomenon—the dinosaurs and a cow named Ruhina5 could attest to that. Indeed, the New York Times reported that by 1979 there had already been 6,811 known instances of whole or fragmented pieces of human-made space objects falling back to earth.6 That number has undoubtably significantly increased. According to NASA, an average of one catalogued piece of debris has fallen back to Earth each day during the past 50 years.7 In its Annual Space Environment Report, the European Space Agency reported that in 2024, 1,200 intact objects and millions of debris fragments had re-entered Earth’s atmosphere.8

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