As I was laying awake in the middle of the night, thinking about the talk I agreed to give at the Ituna library next week about the SpaceX debris fall, I suddenly thought about the North Carolina campground that also found pieces of a Crew Dragon Trunk...
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As I was laying awake in the middle of the night, thinking about the talk I agreed to give at the Ituna library next week about the SpaceX debris fall, I suddenly thought about the North Carolina campground that also found pieces of a Crew Dragon Trunk at the same time https://www.theglampingcollective.com/activities/spacex-dragon-debris/
And I wondered... do they still have them? Did SpaceX ever offer to pick them up? (Probably not because they weren't obligated by an int'l treaty...)
Anyway, that's *one* of today's wild emails to send.
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G gustavinobevilacqua@mastodon.cisti.org shared this topic
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I learned recently that everything went TOTALLY differently in Australia when SpaceX dropped a Crew Dragon Trunk on them in 2022: https://www.livescience.com/spacex-rocket-hits-sheep-farm
SpaceX reps came and answered lots of questions, looked at the pieces and said "yep, you can keep them." Then the Australian Space Agency said "Nope, those belong to us" and took them away from farmers with no compensation. As a result, there are lots of pieces still out there.
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To contrast: When SpaceX reps came here to pick up the Crew Dragon Trunk pieces in a rented U-Haul, they didn't answer a single question from me or press, but they also paid farmers $5000 each. (That was also how much they paid for the Starlink piece that was found in a different part of Sask a few months later, though they just had the farmer FedEx the piece to them rather than pick it up in a U-haul).
The Canadian Space Agency (as far as I know) wasn't involved in either exchange at all.
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I'm hoping that by giving a talk in Ituna, I'll find out about a few more pieces that have been discovered since 2024. I am 100% sure there are more pieces.
I hope farmers will feel comfortable telling me about them. But I don't have $5000 to give them, and I don't have a good way to get in touch with SpaceX (they don't want to talk to me), and CSA still doesn't have any official way to report space debris, though supposedly they're working on it. It's all on me to find out about this garbage!
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Like I said, I'm guessing that SpaceX just left the pieces in North Carolina, because there's no treaty that makes them deal with it in their own country.
A tale of 3 Crew Dragon Trunks. 3 totally different ways of SpaceX dealing with their (potentially lethal) garbage.
SpaceX and others are going to drop a hell of a lot more on us (everything in LEO is coming down eventually), so I guess we'll see how they deal with it next time...
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@sundogplanets Everything you talk about here, reminds me of the French mini series "Infiniti" https://canneseries.com/en/series/infiniti-1/ where they find mysterious connections between space debris and waxed corpses. These scenes when villagers try to sell space debris to the Russians or build huts with them ...
Meanwhile *reality* sounds like a mystery thriller!
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@NatureMC Wow I do NOT want to watch this before trying to find more debris pieces! Haha
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How to forget the French Roswell, too?
