Now, three years on, the Australian Space Agency is displaying one of the biggest pieces of debris at its Discovery Centre at Lot Fourteen in Adelaide.
The agency has also confirmed that the pieces were part of NASA’s Crew 1 mission, which carried four astronauts to the ISS and were likely intentionally jettisoned from the capsule as it re-entered Earth’s atmosphere.
The fragments were first discovered, though, by ordinary Australians in winter 2022, with one even recovered in the Snowy Mountains. Shortly afterwards, SpaceX sent a team to investigate, and the UN’s Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space issued a statement.
However, while the capsule was initially speculated to be a SpaceX spacecraft that re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere on 9 July that year, it has now been confirmed to be from a mission that splashed down two months earlier.
Onboard Crew-1 were NASA's Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover, Shannon Walker, alongside Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi. Incredibly, also onboard was Purra, a toy space kangaroo sent by the Australian Space Agency.
To view the special display, visitors can enter Lot Fourteen via North Terrace and walk towards the back of the McEwin Building, which is home to the Australian Space Discovery Centre. Visitors will also be able to see a new 20-metre-high mural of a “celestial platypus” on the outside of the same building.
In the years since, debris from SpaceX launches has continued to make international headlines, due to more frequent launches from its Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon capsule, alongside test blast-offs of the larger Starship launch vehicle.
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In March, for example, Space Connect reported how four airports in Florida were shut down when the eighth test flight of Starship exploded.
The incident, later blamed on an “energetic event” in the vehicle’s rear, led to debris raining down on Earth with streaks across the sky spotted as far away as the Caribbean and Pennsylvania.
“Following the anomaly, SpaceX teams immediately began coordination with the FAA, ATO (air traffic control) and other safety officials to implement pre-planned contingency responses,” SpaceX said in a statement.
“Any surviving debris would have fallen within the pre-planned Debris Response Area.”
Starship is the collective name for the SpaceX Super Heavy booster rocket and Starship spacecraft, destined to fly humans to Mars one day.
Testing began in April 2023 when the spacecraft failed to reach orbit, but culminated in the first stage incredibly returning to the original launch pad and being caught by mechanical arms in October last year.
Its ninth flight also failed, with the craft breaking up on re-entry after its Super Heavy boosters also broke apart, while another prototype in development exploded on a test stand late last month.
Adam Thorn
Adam is a journalist who has worked for more than 40 prestigious media brands in the UK and Australia. Since 2005, his varied career has included stints as a reporter, copy editor, feature writer and editor for publications as diverse as Fleet Street newspaper The Sunday Times, fashion bible Jones, media and marketing website Mumbrella as well as lifestyle magazines such as GQ, Woman’s Weekly, Men’s Health and Loaded. He joined Momentum Media in early 2020 and currently writes for Australian Aviation and World of Aviation.
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