Space junk falling on Saskatchewan farmland prompts question: who’s liable?

Barry Sawchuk farms with his three sons near Ituna, close to Regina, and was checking out the moisture in his fields at the end of April when he found the item.

In the past few years, there have been a variety of cases of space debris falling to Earth, with one object crashing through the roof of a Florida home in March and most recently, a piece of debris from a SpaceX spacecraft landing in a Saskatchewan farmer’s field.

That farmer is Barry Sawchuk and though some might be surprised, he said he’s just “going with the flow.”

“It is what it is, it’s just another day, another thing,” he said with a shrug when speaking with Global News.

Sawchuk farms with his three sons near Ituna, close to Regina, and was checking out the moisture in his fields at the end of April when he found the item. According to Sawchuk, it looked like a burned-up piece of carbon fibre with aluminum honeycombed in between, and included a hydraulic cylinder. He noted they also found a second smaller piece nearby on their land.

The family reached out to Samantha Lawler, associate professor of astronomy at the University of Regina, who said that on receiving a photo of the object she knew what it was.

“I saw a picture of it like, oh, that’s actually space junk, oh my God,” she told Global News in an interview. “That’s amazing, (and) also terrifying.”

Lawler then contacted one of her colleagues, Harvard astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell, who tracks space launches. He then determined what Sawchuk found was likely linked to a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft that had returned to Earth in February.

The Transportation and Safety Board of Canada confirmed there were no reports of aircraft that could explain the object.