A Mystery Object From Space Crashes Down In North Carolina But What Is It?

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No, it’s a piece of space junk! A piece of space debris believed to be from a recent SpaceX mission was found in rural North Carolina. An employee of The Glamping Collective, a company that operates cabins and other facilities on a mountaintop about 20 miles west of Asheville, North Carolina discovered the unexpected debris.

The piece of debris is believed to possibly be from a recent SpaceX mission, when a Crew Dragon spacecraft returned to Earth. Astronomer Jonathon McDowell added on X/Twitter that the debris “definitely looks consistent with being a bit of the Crew-7 Dragon’s trunk which reentered on a path right over this location on Tuesday.”


“Space debris was not on our list of things we expected to be having conversations about,” remarked Matt Bare, owner of The Glamping Collective located in the Crabtree community. “The only thing we’ve been able to come up with is that it’s some type of space debris that fell. It doesn’t look like anything off of an airplane.” The debris is also said to be identical in appearance to SpaceX debris found on a farm in Canada last month.

Justin Clontz, whose dad found the debris while mowing, said the debris was found while they were performing their weekly maintenance. He believed it arrived from somewhere up above on Monday, the day before they mowed. Clontz added that there are usually people hiking on trails that are staying on the private mountaintop, and no one said anything about it.


Clontz explained, “I just tied a rope to it and drug it out with a lawn mower.” He added, “It’s a one in a million chance that it lands especially, if it landed somewhere off the trail in the woods you’d have never found it, but it just happened to land on the trail.”

The Glamping Collective’s owners remarked they plan on reaching out to aerospace experts to decide whether or not the debris did come from space, and if so, from where.

Images courtesy of The Mountaineer