Last week, the Sheriff’s Office in Stevens County, Minnesota made a startling Facebook post.
“On October 14, 2026, at approximately 3:30pm, the Stevens County Sheriff’s Office received a phone call of foreign debris that was found in a cornfield in Scott Township,” it wrote. “Upon responding, deputies confirmed that a large, metallic object, approximately 11-feet in diameter, presumably a space object, was present in the cornfield. The Sheriff’s Office is working closely with several state and federal agencies to identify and notify the owner of the debris and to plan for removal from the field.”
The post, which included a photo of a banged-up metal object surrounded by yellowed stalks of corn, quickly started picking up traction on social media due to the implication that the object had come from space.
Now, Ars Technica has the receipts: the object was almost certainly chunk of a Chinese Zhuque-2E rocket that launched from the Gobi Desert, deployed 10 satellites, and then headed back Earthward, where it was spotted burning up in the skies over Kansas and Minnesota.
As launches get more common and rockets get larger and sturdier — the model built by LandSpace, which deposited the debris in the cornfield, is a workhorse spacecraft meant to ferry cargo to Earth’s orbit — the chances of their detritus surviving the journey back to the ground increases.
These chunks of spacefaring equipment can sometimes crash down in populated areas. In 2024, a NASA component from the International Space Station withstood reentry and crashed through a home in Florida where a family was sleeping. Space wreckage has previously been discovered previously on farms in Canada and Australia.
Nobody has yet been injured by a piece of falling space debris, but as commercial ambitions for Earth’s orbit increase — the Chinese rocket had been launched to deploy satellites for a connectivity constellation meant to rival SpaceX’s Starlink — it’s probably only a matter of time.
More on space debris: Space Junk Now Almost Constantly Crashing Down to Earth
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