Man Wakes Up, Finds That Large Chunk of SpaceX Rocket Has Crashed Into His Garden

A Polish man named Adam Borucki made an unusual discovery in his backyard after waking up one day: the purported remains of a second stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

As the UK tabloid The Daily Mail reports, Borucki reported the "large object about [five by three feet] in size" to the local police.

"We are investigating how the object ended up in this location, but the important thing is that no one was harmed," police spokesman Andrzej Borowiak told the tabloid.

It seems likely that the object once belonged to a Falcon 9 rocket that made an "uncontrolled reentry" over Poland early Wednesday morning, according to the Polish Space Agency.

The incident serves as yet another reminder of the very real risks involved in having rockets uncontrollably drop back down to Earth. We've already seen several instances of SpaceX debris raining down over populated areas, from two separate Australian farms to the British islands of Turks and Caicos, which were recently littered with the exploded remains of SpaceX's prototype Starship rocket.

As the Polish Press Agency reports, an "unidentified object resembling a tank" was also discovered by employees of a company near the Polish city of Poznan. It's unclear, however, if the object is related to the one Borucki discovered in his backyard.

"We are securing the scene... explaining the circumstances of how this object ended up on the premises of the company," Poznan police officer Lukasz Paterski told the Polish Press Agency. "We know that parts from a Falcon rocket had flown over Poland, but whether this is part of it, we are not able to confirm at the moment."

While officials have yet to confirm whether the object once belonged to the orbital rocket, space tracker extraordinaire and Harvard astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell told Futurism in an email that the recovered tank is the "right size and shape for the [composite overwrapped pressure vessel (COPV)] tanks used on the Falcon 9 upper stage."

"Similar tanks have survived Falcon 9 stage 2 reentries in the past, showing similar damage (delamination)," he added. "And Poznan is right on the reentry path so it all hangs together. "

Case in point, a similar-looking COPV tank was recovered from a farm in central Washington in 2021 after a second stage burned up over Oregon and Washington.

"I am convinced this is genuine and is a fragment of the stage reentry," McDowell told Futurism.

The rocket originally launched from the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on February 1, delivering the latest batch of SpaceX's Starlink broadband satellites into orbit.

Burning leftovers of the rocket lit up the night sky over not just Poland, but the neighboring Germany and Ukraine as well. Footage on social media shows a massive streak of heated-up rocket parts above Berlin.

Unlike the first-stage booster of SpaceX's Falcon 9, which is designed to return to Earth in one piece to be reused, its second stage is intended to fall back towards Earth after delivering the rocket's payload in orbit, where it burns up in the atmosphere.

However, parts of the second stage can survive the blistering journey, dropping out of the sky over a predetermined path — which, in some instances, can fall on populated areas.

More on SpaceX debris: Island Littered With Debris After Elon Musk’s Starship Explodes Overhead