The British daily Guardian reported on the 22nd (local time) that an American family whose house was damaged by space debris that fell from the sky filed a lawsuit against the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) for $80,000 in damages.
U.S. law firm Cranfill Sumner announced that it had filed this lawsuit on behalf of Alejandre Otero and his family, who lives in Naples, Florida. A metal cylinder slab from a cargo pallet that fell off the International Space Station (ISS) in 2021 drifted through space and crashed into Otero’s house on March 8 of this year, three years later. No one was injured, but there were holes in the roof and floor of the house.
Otero told local media that her son, who was home at the time, was almost hit by a falling object. After collecting and analyzing this object at the Kennedy Space Center, NASA confirmed that it had fallen from the ISS’s flight support equipment.
The size of this metal cylinder was 10 cm wide and 4 cm long, and its weight was 726 g. Otero demanded that NASA pay compensation for damage to uninsured property, work disruption, and mental suffering caused by the space debris crash. Otero’s lawyer, Mika Nguyen Worthy, said, “We are grateful that no one was hurt, but this near miss could have been a disaster.
If the debris had fallen a few meters in the other direction, there could have been serious injuries or deaths.”. He said that he is trying to set a precedent for compensation for damages caused by space debris through this lawsuit.