Can you imagine being calm at home when, suddenly, rocket debris starts to fall in your yard? This was more or less what happened on a farm in Washington (USA), after a piece of the Falcon 9 rocket, from SpaceX, leave a 10 cm deep mark on the ground.
The incident was recorded days after some people reported seeing a kind of “meteor shower” in the sky – what was later identified as being rocket wreckage.
Falcon 9 is responsible for taking Starlink satellites into Earth orbit and is divided into two modules. While the first is reusable and returns to Earth, the second is released into the atmosphere so that it falls into the ocean or burns completely when reentering our planet. But, it seems, the procedure this time did not go quite as expected.
According to The Verge, the object that fell on the farm was the size of a punching bag and was probably part of a sturdy module made to pressurize the rocket tanks, called COPV (acronym in English for Coated Compound Pressure Vessel).
The Grant County police office, where the farm hit by the object is located, said it would not release further details and that “the owner simply wants to be left alone”.
