(NewsNation) — A two-pound remnant of a battery pack shot out from the International Space Station and crashed through the roof of a Florida home, causing a gaping hole earlier this year.

The battery was supposed to burn up in the atmosphere without any harm. Instead, it landed on the Naples house.

Homeowner Alejandro Otero’s teenage son was home at the time, and the debris nearly missed him, he told a local news outlet. 

“I was shaking. I was completely in disbelief. What are the chances of something landing on my house with such force to cause so much damage,” Otero said. “I’m super grateful that nobody got hurt.”

Otero is suing NASA for $80,000. The family’s attorney, Mica Nguyen Worthy, said in a statement that this incident is a real-life example that space debris is a “real serious issue because of the increase in space traffic in recent years.” 

Worthy said the “U.S. government, through NASA, has an opportunity to set the standard or ‘set a precedent’ as to what responsible, safe, and sustainable space operations ought to look like” with the Otero case.

Space debris has thus far not caused grave property damage or injury, but aviation officials’ notion that debris burns up in the atmosphere may not be as solid as they once thought.

The Federal Aviation Administration has said that fragments left behind in space “burn up” during their reentry, but during the past 50 years, an average of one cataloged piece of debris fell back to Earth each day, according to NASA.

The pieces that make it down are most likely to hit an ocean or sparsely populated areas such as the Canadian Tundra, the Australian Outback or Siberia, the agency noted.

With launches occurring almost daily now, space traffic has risen exponentially, which has increased the chances of damage and injury, space experts told NewsNation. 

More goes up, more comes down 

There are more than 25,000 objects larger than 10 centimeters known to exist in Earth’s orbit, according to NASA.

That number keeps growing. Last year, a record-setting 2,800 satellites entered the lower Earth orbit, according to the European Space Agency’s 2024 Space Environment Report released this month. 

It calls the congestion levels “unsustainable,” adding that satellites that remain in their operational orbit at the end of their mission risk breaking into dangerous clouds of debris that linger in orbit for many years.

“Active satellites must perform an increasing number of collision avoidance maneuvers to dodge out of the way of other satellites and fragments of space debris,” it states. 

“The adoption of space debris mitigation measures is slowly improving, but it is still not enough to stop the increase of the amount of space debris.”

These measures include better compliance with removing satellites from orbits at the end of their lifetime and more controlled reentries, according to the agency.

Space debris refers to “human-generated objects” like pieces of spacecraft, parts of rockets, nonfunctional satellites or explosions of objects in orbit flying around in space at high speeds, according to the agency.

“The more stuff we put up there, the more is going to come down, the better chance that things are going to come down and hit somebody,” John Crassidis, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University at Buffalo, told NewsNation. 

While the probability of that happening is low today, Crassidis says he’s concerned about what’s going to happen years from now.

“I truly believe in 50 years, if we don’t do something, we’re going to be close to Kessler Syndrome,” he said.

Kessler Syndrome is a space scenario where the number of satellites and orbital debris is so high that collisions occur, each one generating more and more space debris and, in turn, cascading collisions, according to the University of Arizona. 

In a statement to NewsNation NASA said NASA it is “committed to responsible operations for all its space missions and mitigating as much risk as possible to protect people on Earth” and that for decades, it has implemented the “U.S. Government Orbital Debris Mitigation Standard Practices into policies and procedures to limit the generation of new orbital debris to protect the near-Earth space environment and follow best practices.”

What regulates space debris? 

Outer space regulation falls under the Liability Convention of 1967 within the United Nations Outer Space Treaty. 

Under the document deemed the “Magna Carta of space law,” any country is strictly liable when its objects come down and cause property damage, personal injury or death, according to Mark Sundahl, a professor at Cleveland State University College of Law who focuses on space law. 

The treaty makes it clear who is responsible when a country’s space agency is involved, but it starts to “show its age” when it comes to the private space travel industry, he said.

In May, several remnants of SpaceX Crew Dragon reentered the atmosphere and were found along a walking trail of a North Carolina mountaintop.

The same month, another large piece of debris from SpaceX was found in a farmer’s field in Saskatchewan, Canada.

SpaceX did not return requests for comment by NewsNation.

“We’ve kind of let the genie out of the bottle by licensing massive mega constellations,” Sundahl said, referring to the networks of thousands of satellites such as SpaceX’s Starlink.

Curbing orbit pollution 

Objects are supposed to burn up, but that’s not always the case, said Moriba Jah, an associate professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Texas at Austin.

Something the size of a softball will definitely burn up, but larger objects that are “left to mother nature to be cleaned up then, that’s when the science is not complete because we’re just not good predictors of what mother nature will do,” he said.  

Jah said that responsible disposal means intentionally bringing objects back and making sure they burn up.  

“But that costs fuel and energy, and so people don’t want to be bothered with that additional cost of proper disposal of objects,” he said.

“There’s still a lot of guessing when it comes to this sort of thing which in and of itself, is problematic.”

NASA recently gave Elon Musk’s SpaceX a $843 million contract to take the International Space Station out of orbit at the beginning of 2031 once time is up for the sprawling lab.

SpaceX said it will use a powerful Dragon capsule that will dock at the station and tug it slowly out of orbit and over a remote section of the South Pacific or possibly the Indian Ocean.

It is the biggest structure ever built off the planet.

NASA said that a “key goal” of its new Space Sustainability Strategy  is to prioritize ways to minimize “uncertainties about orbital debris, including identifying opportunities for breakthrough improvements in their ability to sense and predict the space environment, strengthening modeling processes, sensing technology, database, and other approaches to better predict and reduce risk in the space environment and minimize risk from debris that could survive re-entry,” in a statement.

Jah believes the United States should build a coalition of countries engaged in space exploration who collectively decide on stricter regulations on exit plans for objects put into space. 

“I don’t think that there’s a global appetite for another treaty or convention on this, and amending the treaties probably is a tall order, but getting some sort of agreement amongst spacefaring countries would be good,” he said, noting that geopolitics will be a big hurdle.

Jah said more pressure should be put on governments to examine how to make space systems “reusable, recyclable and how we do space operations in a way that is environmentally safe and sustainable, minimizing the harm to people.”

And abandonment is not an answer, he said. 

According to Crassidis, tracking of space objects also needs to improve by taking more consideration of the size and materials that are going up. 

Though predictions are accurate, they aren’t accurate enough due to space disturbances, he said. 

“That’s going to lead to better calculations of that collision probability,” Crassidis said.  

Current efforts to clean up space debris

Efforts are being put forth to curb debris.

In July, Colorado Rep. Joe Neguse introduced the Orbital Sustainability (ORBITS) Act, a bipartisan bill that would establish a first-of-its-kind demonstration program to help reduce space junk in orbit.

Some measures include publishing a list of debris objects that pose the greatest risk to the safety of orbiting spacecraft and on-orbit activities and pushing a program to develop technology for remediating debris objects through repurposing or removal from orbit.

SpaceX announced last month that it plans to move Dragon spacecraft recovery operations from the East Coast to the Pacific. The company hopes the changed landing trajectory will keep potential spacecraft debris over the ocean.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.