Space flight doesn’t usually come to mind when you think of the serene, green mountains of North Carolina.
It’s true that NASA built the (now defunct) Rosman Satellite Tracking and Data Acquisition Facility among the rolling hills of Appalachia in the early 1960s to track Soviet satellites and relay communications for the Gemini and Apollo programs. And of course there are some dark skies over Western North Carolina that allow for good satellite and sky viewing.
But when it comes to today’s boom in private spaceflight, these lush mountains are about as far removed as you can get from the bustling spaceports of Florida’s Space Coast. That’s why it was such a shock when I discovered that a large piece of space debris had been identified near Canton, North Carolina, just outside the city of Asheville, where I live.
I had to go see it for myself.
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On May 22, grounds manager Justin Clontz and his father were conducting trail maintenance at the scenic Glamping Collective, a 160-acre luxury campground with private dome-style cabins on a mountaintop with panoramic views of the surrounding Pisgah and Cherokee National Forests.
As Clontz and his father came around a bend in the trail that day, they came across a strange piece of junk lying on the ground not far from the trail at all. The debris was approximately 1 meter by 1 meter in size and consisted of shredded carbon fiber composite and scorched metal, with visible metal bolts and plates protruding from it. It had a faint odor, similar to ozone.
“It landed right in the middle of the path,” Clontz told Space.com. “It was just wild. It looked crazy. I really didn’t know what to think.”
There was no damage to surrounding trees or grass, Clontz said. It was as if someone had placed the debris exactly where it could be found, on a peaceful path through the Pisgah National Forest.
Clontz and other Glamping Collective employees initially thought the debris might have come from a military aircraft. “I didn’t know if we should touch it,” Clontz added.
Scientists would soon give their opinion.
It turned out that the piece of debris likely came from the return of the SpaceX Crew-7 mission to the International Space Station, which returned to Earth on March 12, 2024, said astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. . “This certainly appears to match a piece of the Crew-7 Dragon’s trunk that re-entered on a path directly above this location on Tuesday,” McDowell wrote on X after news of the debris began circulating.
The astrophysicist also posted a map showing the return path of the piece of Crew-7’s trunk believed to be responsible for the debris, which shows the spacecraft’s hardware passing directly over Canton, NC – exactly where Clontz copy found (and, disturbingly, passed almost immediately my house).
The “fuselage,” as SpaceX calls it, is the unpressurized tail section of the company’s Dragon spacecraft, what other aerospace manufacturers would call a service module. This section carries cargo or small satellites, is equipped with solar panels that power Dragon when the ship is flying or docked to the ISS, and has fins for aerodynamic control during emergency aborts.
While Dragon capsules make their way safely back to Earth in controlled descents ultimately slowed by parachutes, the spacecraft’s “fuselage remains attached to Dragon until shortly before re-entering Earth’s atmosphere,” SpaceX writes on its website , after which it is thrown overboard.
Furthermore, it appears that not only can these strains remain in orbit for weeks longer than their host capsules, but that large portions of them can also remain intact after their fiery reentry into Earth’s atmosphere.
“The discovery of debris from the SpaceX Dragon trunk of the Crew-7 mission in North Carolina, following debris from the Ax-3 trunk in Saskatchewan and from the Crew-1 trunk in Australia, makes it clear that the materials from the trunk regularly survives the return in large pieces,” McDowell wrote in May on
SpaceX eventually sent a team to investigate the fall of the Australian debris, a senior director of SpaceX’s human spaceflight program said after that event.
But SpaceX has not yet contacted the Glamping Collective about the alleged debris, a manager at the site told Space.com.
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Despite how worrying these discoveries may seem, there is no need to panic. According to the Aerospace Corporation, the chance of being struck and injured by falling space debris is less than one in one trillion, far smaller than the risk of being struck by lightning or even bitten by a shark.
Clontz acknowledges how rare the discovery is, and says finding the debris won’t worry him about other pieces of space junk falling near him. “I looked at the sky a few times today,” he said, laughing. ‘But I’m not afraid of it. I mean, how many planes fly over every day? How many satellites are up there in orbit?’
The Glamping Collective plans to build a display case for the debris along the path where it was found.