Fireballs streaking across the sky spark epic hunt for space garbage

Fireballs streakingacross the sky in late March set off an epic hunt for the space junk that hit Earth with a boom in one case metres from a Washington state trailer home with an older couple inside.

The fiery re-entry of the remains of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket into Earth's atmosphere on March 25 created a light show that wascaptured on video by people from Oregon to British Columbia.

Images of the bright display lit up skies and social media. The fragmented rocket's re-entry also sent a data signal alerting a trio of meteorite detectives interested in objects that survive the atmosphere's intense heat and how far they travel.

While most wayward rockets burn up in the atmosphere,a few survive,in this case, smashing into the Earth in eastern Washington state.

So far nobody from SpaceX, Nasa or the Federal Aviation Administration has taken muchinterest.

Watch | Errant rocket parts fall to Earth and light up the night sky:

Rocket debris from satellite launch puts on light show over West Coast

4 years ago

Duration 0:57

Observers in B.C., Washington state and Oregon captured what is believed to be the remains of a rocket used by SpaceX.

But Prescott, Ariz. "space cowboy" Robert Ward did, rushingto hunt for the rocket's remains.

"Anything that falls from space, I'm fascinated by it," said Ward."When man's creations resist the force of nature, I find that intriguing."

Ward hasspent 31 years tracking meteorites and co-ordinates with Mike Hankey, a software developer with the American Meteor Society in Bethesda, Md.,and Ken Howard, a meteorologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Oklahoma.

"You are literally hunting for trash. Ithas no real value," said Hankey.

But it still excites him.

"There's always a treasure hunting aspect to this ... in finding something that justlanded on Earth from space," Hankey said.

He says witnesses end up with valuable data on their phones if they take video, which can be usedto determine important details.

Hankey says he uses an app he createdby revamping an old crowdsourcing toolto glean data from eyewitness accounts and triangulate the location of whatever fell to Earth.

Howard, the meteorologist,analyzed the weather data, and between them, they were able to pin down the flight path of what was left of the Falcon 9 within thedistance of afew football fields.

Ward then flew north from Arizona to Washington state on his first hunt forspace garbage.It's not unlike hunting for meteorites, which, he says,can be a dangerous business.

Over the decades, he sayshe's been shot at, attacked with a machete and even jailed for weeks in the Middle East after he was accused of spying while meteorite huntingin the Oman desert.

Ward says he came closest to death after he was bitten by a Rocky Mountain tick whilehunting for hunks of rockfromthe Sutter's Mill meteoritethat fell to earth in 2012.

So he wasn't phased when an irate homeowner pointed a shotgun at him in April as he hunted down tanks from the Falcon 9 rocket.

Theblack cylinder-shaped object had landed15 metres from a trailer homein Mattawa, Wash.

Ward says the wife was friendly, but the husband aimed a gun at him, and the sheriff ended up hauling the tank away.

But the location data helped him track two composite overwrapped pressure vessel (COPV) tanks, often used in spaceflight to hold fluids under pressure.

Thetanks are wrapped incarbon fibrecomposite and contain super-cold helium under high pressure, which, he says, were inside Falcon 9's larger liquid oxygen or LOX tankand played a part in the failure of the one of the spacecraft's rocket.

Ward says each of the cylinders appearedremarkably intact after hitting temperatures of1,480 Cduring re-entry, probably because they were protected inside another tank.

The 90-kilogram tanks were foundnot far from a bend in the Columbia River, east of Yakima.Ward saysthey are bound in black carbon fibre thatbreaks off, almost like needles and acts like fibreglass.

"It's really nasty stuff. I wore protective gear, but I was itching for days after."

Ward says loaded the two tanks he recovered into a Ford F150 and drove home to Arizona with the plunder.This week, he got word that another had turned up, not far from where he found the first three.

His fellow space-junk hunter, Hankey, sayshe suspects heavier parts of the rocket likely hit the ground farther east perhaps as far away as Idaho or farther north.

"Where's the fuel pump? Where's the engine? Where's the really heavy pieces? Those could be in Canada," he said.

The team has emailed Elon Musk's SpaceX company about itsfind but so far there's been no response or interest in the space garbage.

CBC reached out to SpaceX and NASA.

A NASA spokesperson said the space agency is only interested in cleaning upspace debris that's still in orbit.