Space junk. And who pays?

I found this interesting. We had another bit of space debris return to earth recently. Scientists suggested it would burn up on reentry and thus didn't plot an exact course for its de-orbit. 

It did not burn up. It did hit a house on the west coast of Florida and caused some amount of damage to the house and the surroundings. 

The homeowner talked with the insurance company about repairs, and were told that they'd have to pay the deductible - and that would not cover some of the other damage. 

This was not something that happened to the house due to an issue inside. This was not a natural disaster. And yet, insurance told them "sorry."

And then there was a complicating factor that the debris in question was part of a European space agency experiment. Which may have made this an international issue. But since it was attached to the ISS (which is under nasas purveyance), nasa agreed to cover at least some of the costs. 

But it leads to much bigger questions. Can we accurately predict what will happen with these things? Who is responsible? What if it was a private company's satellite? What if people were actually harmed? 

There's a lot of junk in space, and we need to be planning to do something with it. 

https://www.npr.org/2024/04/23/1243676256/space-station-junk-hits-florida-home-liability