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The authorities are investigating the origin of a large object that fell to the ground on the outskirts of one of Poland’s largest cities. There are suspicions that it may be part of a Falcon 9 launch vehicle used by Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
Early on Wednesday morning, unusual flashes were seen in the sky in some parts of Poland.
Nad ranem nad Polską można było zaobserwować tajemnicze rozbłyski. Jak przekazał popularyzator astronomii Karol Wójcicki, były to spalające się w atmosferze szczątki drugiego stopnia rakiety Falcon 9 od firmy SpaceX.
Rakieta została wystrzelona 1 lutego 2025 roku, z bazy sił… pic.twitter.com/7x7xmZ4zpm
— 🌐 ᴛʜᴇᴘᴏʟᴀɴᴅɴᴇᴡs 🌐 (@thepolandnews_) February 19, 2025
In the afternoon, the Polish Space Agency (POLSA) confirmed that “between 04:46 and 04:48 a.m., an uncontrolled entry into the atmosphere of a FALCON 9 R/B launch vehicle stage occurred over the territory of Poland”.
“The rocket stage, weighing approximately four tonnes, came from the Space X Starlink Group 11-4 mission, which took off from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on 1 February 2025,” added POLSA.
“The flight trajectory of this object was known to POLSA and the services responsible in Europe for monitoring the risk of artificial space objects entering the Earth’s atmosphere.”
Meanwhile, a spokesman for the police force in Poznań, Poland’s fifth-largest city, told the Polish Press Agency (PAP) that at 9:20 a.m. they had been notified that an unidentified object had been found on the premises of a company in Komorniki, a village that is part of the Poznań metropolitan area.
“We are securing the scene,” said the spokesman. “Firefighters and police officers from the pyrotechnic reconnaissance group are working there…[to] explain the circumstances of how this object ended up on the premises of the company.”
“We know that debris from a Falcon missile flew over Poland, but whether this is part of it – we are not able to confirm this at the moment,” he added, also noting that no one had been injured by the object.
The director of the facility where the object was discovered, Adam Borucki, told news website Interia that it is around one and a half metres (five feet) long and looks like a “tank wrapped in foil with a piece of pipe sticking out”.
A person involved in the investigation, speaking anonymously to news website Onet, says that the object “looks almost identical to a fragment of the Falcon that fell in the US in 2021” (which is shown on the right in the Facebook post above, alongside the Polish object on the left).
Following this morning’s incident, Poland’s defence minister, Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz, told broadcaster RMF that it was “not something that threatens state security”.
Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.
Main image credit: Z głową w gwiazdach/Facebook
Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.
