On a March afternoon in 2026, a rock older than the planet punched through a Houston roof, crossed the attic, and came to rest on a bed.
On March 21, 2026, a meteoroid estimated at about a ton broke apart roughly 29 miles above the Houston metro area, releasing energy on the order of 26 tons of TNT and rattling the city with sonic booms. A fist-sized fragment survived all the way to the ground in the Ponderosa Forest neighborhood. Meteorite hunters and scientists recovered more than a dozen pieces; the early read is an ordinary chondrite.
- Event: Houston meteorite
- Date: March 21, 2026
- Meteoroid: ~1 ton, broke up ~29 miles up
- Airburst: ~26 tons TNT
- Damage: through a roof and attic, onto a bed
- Type: ordinary chondrite
Nature's version of the Naples house
Two years earlier, a piece of a discarded space-station battery pallet went through a roof in Naples, Florida. This time the object came from deep space rather than low orbit.
Same hole in the ceiling, very different ledger. One is a rock older than Earth that owes us nothing. The other is hardware we left in orbit and lost track of. Nature gets a pass. Our debris does not, and that is the half of the falling-sky problem Space Waste exists to work on.
The homeowner, by every account, kept the rock. You would too.
See the Reentry Log →Sources: Lunar and Planetary Institute · American Meteor Society