The atmospheric re-entry and breakup of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket upper stage created a fiery display in the skies above the Pacific Northwest a week ago, but not all of those shooting stars burned up on the way down.
At least one big piece of the rocket — a roughly 5-foot-long composite-overwrapped pressure vessel — fell onto private property in southwest Grant County in Central Washington, the county sheriff’s office reported today in a tweet.
Kyle Foreman, a spokesman for the sheriff’s office, told GeekWire that the property owner left a message reporting the debris last weekend. Based on the reports about March 25’s meteor show, SpaceX’s rocket re-entry loomed as the likeliest cause for the commotion.
“The sheriff’s office checked it out on Monday, and SpaceX staff came over on Tuesday and retrieved it,” Foreman said.
He was unaware of any other reports of fallen rocket debris — and in its tweet, the sheriff’s office made clear that it considered the case closed. “Media and treasure hunters: we are not disclosing specifics,” it said. “The property owner simply wants to be left alone.”
We’ve reached out to SpaceX and will update this report with anything we hear back.
Composite-overwrapped pressure vessels, or COPVs, are standard components in Falcon 9 rockets. They’re designed to hold the helium gas that’s used to pressurize propellant tanks. COPVs are likely candidates to survive re-entry because they’re relatively lightweight and heat-resistant.
If SpaceX’s Starlink satellite launch on March 4 had gone completely by the book, the pressure vessel would probably have fallen into the ocean without notice. But the second stage’s deorbit burn didn’t work out as planned, and so the fiery plunge occurred two weeks after launch, over Oregon and Washington state rather than the unobserved sea. (The first-stage booster, in contrast, flew itself back to a drone ship in the Atlantic minutes after launch, as planned.)
This isn’t the first time a COPV tank has caused a rocket ruckus: Five years ago, a launch-pad anomaly that led the loss of a Falcon 9 rocket and its multimilllion-dollar satellite payload was traced to a COPV breach. That led to a redesign of the tank to make it sturdier — and arguably, more likely to survive re-entry.
