Home hit by Russian space debris

A part of a Russian booster rocket used to deliver a spacecraft into orbit has fallen on the roof of a two-storey home in Russia’s Altai Region, in South Siberia, the ITAR-TASS news agency reported on Friday quoting a source in the local directorate of the Emergencies Ministry.

The source said that the incident took part in the village of Baranovka late on Thursday night. Local residents heard two sharp cracks and then something fell on the roof of a two-storey apartment block. Rescuers and fire fighters were summoned to the site and they found a piece of metal, roughly one by four feet in size.  

A spokeswoman for the local Emergencies Ministry directorate has said that the experts had quickly established that the object was a piece of the booster rocket that was launched from the Baikonur launching pad at 22:37 Moscow time on Thursday.

No one was injured in the incident and the house was not seriously damaged.

However, the Russian Space Agency was skeptical about the report, saying that local residents could have found a piece of space debris somewhere else and then carried it to their roof in the hope of receiving compensation for damages. “There is only one fragment and the house is not within the calculated area of possible debris fallout. In any case, there are no casualties or material damage, according to our information,” the Space Agency’s spokesman has told the press.

The Soyuz booster rocket carrying the Progress-M-02M cargo spacecraft started for the International Space Station on Thursday night. The Progress-M-02M is expected to dock with the ISS on May 12 at 23:23 Moscow Time.