It Came From Outer Space

“There are no slip-and-fall liability cases in outer space—instead, they’re slip-and-float.”

That’s the kind of joke Mica Nguyen Worthy has heard too many times. Worthy, a partner in the Charlotte office of Cranfill Sumner, made history in May 2024 when she submitted the first-ever space debris claim to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, on behalf of a Florida family whose home was hit by space junk jettisoned by the agency.

NASA chose to settle with Worthy’s client prelawsuit, but the case has prompted conversations in the legal world: Is space the new legal frontier?

Worthy, chair of her firm’s Aviation & Aerospace Practice Group, believes it may be. Space near Earth is getting crowded, with thousands of active satellites and an untold number of inactive ones joining discarded equipment from rockets and spacecraft whizzing around the planet at a speed of about 5 miles per second. Unplanned collisions are inevitable. Each will create more debris—and thus a higher chance of more collisions—and will also increase the possibility of one of these items hurling toward the planet.

“This is a problem that the space community has known about for many, many years, but it really hasn’t become a public concern until more recently,” Worthy says. “Even a small fleck of paint traveling at 17,000 miles per hour could cause a lot of damage.”

Most of these items will be incinerated upon entering Earth’s atmosphere. The strays that make it through are, of course, most likely to fall into water, as it covers three-quarters of the planet. And the odds that one of these falling objects would hit a populated area are even more minute.

That’s why an article Worthy wrote in September 2023 was titled, “Your Chance of Getting Hit by Space Junk is Extremely Low … but Not Zero!”

It was a prescient take. Seven months later, on March 8, 2024, an object roughly the size of a soup can and weighing less than 2 pounds fell through the roof of the Naples, Florida, home of the Otero family, and didn’t stop until it hit ground level. Daniel Otero, 19, was home at the time.

No one was hurt, but the debris caused about $17,000 worth of damage to the Oteros home. “A few inches in either direction, it could have been a much more serious situation,” Worthy says.

The Oteros needed a lawyer, and they found Worthy. She remembers: “I talked to my firm about it and I said, ‘You know, this is probably not going to be a lucrative matter, but seeing how the process works would be of value to our existing clients.’ They allowed me to run with it.”

Worthy helped document the process of turning over the item to NASA. The agency concluded that the object, made in the U.S., was likely part of about 5,800 pounds of hardware dumped by the International Space Station a few years earlier. Their experts had predicted that almost all of the discarded materials would burn upon entering Earth’s atmosphere.

International space law requires the “launching country” to pay for damages caused by “its space object on the surface of the Earth or to aircraft in flight.” The most similar prior incident happened in 1978, when pieces of the Soviet Union’s Kosmos 954 satellite survived the fall through the atmosphere and left radioactive debris in northern Canada. Three years later, the Soviets paid the Canadians $3 million in Canadian dollars for damages and costs associated with the cleanup.

That was an international case; Worthy points out that the Otero matter was the first one to involve private citizens in the nation in question. “I told my client, ‘This is truly unprecedented. There’s not a process for it. There are laws that seem to apply, but they haven’t been tested in a domestic context. We’re going to have to forge a path to see how we’re going to make a claim.’”
While the Oteros’ homeowners policy covered most of the damage, the family incurred other costs, including the deductible. There was also the added stress of knowing something from space fell onto your house while your kid was inside.

Worthy knew she’d have to file an administrative claim with NASA before being able to sue the agency in federal court—a step required by the Federal Tort Claims Act. “Not an ideal process,” she says. But a necessary one. Worthy suspected that, if she did not follow the domestic process precisely, NASA would seek to have the claims dismissed.

So while she was prepared to go the Federal Tort Claims Act route, she also hoped to avoid court, where the outcome would truly be in uncharted territory. She wrote to NASA seeking $80,000 in compensation for her client. The Oteros’ insurance company also sought reimbursement.

To Worthy’s understanding, the matter went to the highest levels of the agency, “you know, like ‘Houston, we have a problem,’” she says. NASA decided to settle with Oteros and the insurance company.
Now, Worthy says, the legal community has the opportunity to “prepare for space-related liability claims and how to consider these claims in the future.”

She believes the space law community should push for a legislative process. “There has to be a domestic claims process that resolves the claims in an efficient manner and doesn’t require an individual citizen to try to articulate fault on the part of an agency,” Worthy says.

She’s confident something like this will happen again.

“Right now, space is for the elites—the people who have money to do it,” she says. “But it won’t be long from now when … it’s going to become more commercialized, and that’s going to raise all kinds of liability issues.”