SpaceX Drops A Load on Saskatchewan

Elon Musk, like any cartoon supervillain worth their salt, has come up with several creative and unusual ways for people to be killed over the years.

While the world’s wealthiest weirdo has yet to unleash an army of flying killer robots like the bad guys did in Iron Man 2, a film he had a cameo in as himself — not unlike a fellow rich asshole did decades earlier in the sequel to Home Alone — there’s no denying the guy has red in his ledger.

There’s the untold number of Ukrainians who surely perished at the hands of Russian forces after Musk cut off internet access through his Starlink satellites to certain parts of the country like Crimea that Putin just really, really wanted. Crom only knows how many mouth-breathers huffed their last on a ventilator after “doing their own research” on the cesspool of COVID misinformation he single-handedly turned Jack Dorsey’s erstwhile global town square into. And of course there’s all the self-crashing cars.

Last month, Tesla settled a lawsuit for an undisclosed amount over the death of Walter Huang, an Apple engineer who was killed in 2018 after his Muskmobile decided to veer into a California highway divider, and the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is currently looking at 23 separate fatalities involving the company’s autopilot system.

But dropping hunks of metal on people from outer space is a potential new one.

A Saskatchewan grain farmer named Barry Sawchuk and his two sons were out checking the fields before planting season recently and were more than a little surprised to find a mysterious 100-pound object made of charred carbon fiber and aluminum honeycomb somewhere it had no earthly business being. Another smaller piece of space junk was found on his land a few days later, and neighbors have since reported finding even more nebulous flotsam and jetsam over a 28-mile radius.

It’s a good thing none of it landed on any chicken coops or Musk might have Kristi Noem to worry about.

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Word spread quickly and reached the desk of Samantha Lawler, an astronomy professor at the nearby University of Regina, who collaborated with a colleague at Harvard in her orbit to figure out it came from a SpaceX Dragon flight that returned its crew capsule safely to the planet in February with four passengers from the International Space Station. They say the junk came from the trunk (yes, that’s the name!), an unpressurized cargo section below the capsule that provides power during flight and ideally burns up after ejection when it hits the atmosphere on the way back down. It’s like the “service module” from the old Apollo missions, but with extra storage.

Lawler has been an academic Chicken Little for years about the danger of freefalling space shit, especially in a time when space travel has been privatized and so many bored billionaires would rather spend their money playing Spaceman Spiff than, say, solving world hunger or the climate crisis. Or simply paying their taxes. Space launches and re-entries are now almost a daily thing, and it is probably only a matter of time before some innocent Earthling gets a quick death from above, although the European Space Agency say the odds of someone getting whacked by space waste are roughly one in 100 billion.

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“I’ve been yelling about this for five years, and now a piece of junk fell an hour away from my house,” Lawler told the Canadian Press. “It’s literally hitting close to home.”

Oddly enough, the big SpaceX dump nearly hit home in a very different way. While it would’ve been funnier if it had instead landed near Vulcan, an otherwise unremarkable hick town in neighboring Alberta that does its best to milk the connection to the Star Trek universe, the Sawchuk farm is actually just a three-hour drive from where Musk first stayed with distant family after arriving solo in Canada as a teenager and scoring citizenship through his mother.

It’s hard to imagine he enjoyed being put to work as a lowly farmhand, and it’s not outside the realm of possibility he’s now taking his revenge by peppering the prairies with deadly space pellets. Even though surely some of the residents are verified on his generic social media site and send him the required eight bucks a month.

Which sounds totally crazy, obviously, but don’t forget who it is we’re talking about here.

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For now Sawchuk doesn’t know what he’s going to do with the unwanted gift from the heavens but he is hoping to somehow sell it and — in peak stereotypical Saskatchewanian — wants to use the money to help build the closest town of Ituna a new hockey rink.

Maybe a certain someone with deep pockets could send him a check.

Or maybe send us one instead

[CNBC / CP]