Suspected SpaceX Dragon Debris Found in Saskatchewan, Canada

TapTechNews May 17th news, a suspected SpaceX Dragon spacecraft part debris was found in a farmland in Saskatchewan, Canada. This charred black fragment is about 6.56 feet long and weighs about 88 pounds. It was discovered by the farmer Barry Sochuk at the end of April this year during the spring plowing.

According to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the debris may come from the cargo hold (the compartment used to store supplies) of the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft.

Astronomer Jonathan McDowell, who tracks the trajectories of spacecraft launches and reentries into the atmosphere, posted that the cargo hold of the Dragon spacecraft used in the Ax-3 mission executed by SpaceX for the private company AxiomSpace reentered the atmosphere on February 26 and passed over Saskatchewan. McDowell, who is also an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, wrote in the post: It looks like a part of the cargo hold has been found.

Because of the deep snow in Saskatchewan in winter and the inability of crops to grow, Sochuk did not discover this debris until the spring sowing.

This is not the first time that SpaceX Dragon spacecraft debris has been found on Earth. In August 2022, debris of the Dragon spacecraft was also found in a remote ranch in Australia and was confirmed by SpaceX and the Australian Space Agency.

When SpaceX personnel talked about similar incidents before, they said they would work closely with NASA and the FAA to use established procedures to predict and handle such issues. The FAA also said that the cargo hold usually burns up over the ocean during the reentry process and poses very little threat to public safety.

However, in April 2021, the secondary debris of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket was also found in a farm in central Washington state. Although the local police confirmed that the debris came from SpaceX, the company did not respond at that time.

According to some provisions of the United Nations Space Treaty, any casualties or property losses caused by space debris can be claimed for compensation. One of the liability conventions in this treaty, namely the Space Liability Convention, has only been invoked once, that is, in 1978 when the Soviet nuclear-powered satellite Cosmos 954 crashed in northern Canada, causing the ecologically sensitive area (where many indigenous people live) to be polluted, and extremely expensive cleanup work that lasted for several years had to be carried out. The Soviet Union compensated the Canadian government CAD 3 million in 1981, which is equivalent to CAD 10 million today (TapTechNews note: currently about 53 million yuan RMB) according to the current exchange rate.