Poland’s defence minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz has disclosed that his ministry did not receive a warning from the Polish Space Agency (POLSA) about the likely crash of the remains of a Falcon 9 space rocket on Polish territory.
Speaking on February 20, he said that was because the warning was sent to a ministry email that had been out of date for six months.
On February 19, POLSA issued a statement confirming that over the night of February 18-19, a part of a Falcon 9 rocket owned by US billionaire Elon Musk’s SpaceX company had entered Polish air space.
“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,” the space agency said.
The part of the rocket that fell on Polish territory near the city of Poznań weighed 4 tonnes and had been launched from the Vandenberg air base in California as part of the SpaceX Starlink Group.
The director of the facility where the object was discovered, Adam Borucki, told news portal Interia that it was around one and a half metres long and looked like a “tank wrapped in foil with a piece of pipe sticking out”.
The ministry of defence later discovered that on February 18, POLSA had sent an email warning about the likelihood of the rocket falling in Poland but to an account that had been out of date for the past six months.
Kosiniak-Kamysz said of the mistake: “There was a communication problem with POLSA, which had failed to ensure that the information reached us earlier.”
In a what seemed a sign of further internal communications problems within the government, the defence minister also admitted he did not have information as to whether or not the Government’s Security Centre had been informed about the approaching rocket.
This prompted the development minister Krzysztof Paszyk to call in the head of POLSA on February 20 to admonish him over the faulty communication procedures. He also took umbrage at the fact that “there had been no assessment of the scale of the danger involved” as regarded the rocket entering Polish airspace.
The incident has caused concern about Poland’s ability to monitor its airspace, especially given it is facing challenges on its Eastern border with Ukraine as a result of the ongoing war with Russia.
In 2022, the Polish authorities lost track of a stray Russian missile that entered Polish airspace from Belarus and ended up near the city of Bydgoszcz.
It was discovered by a walker in the local woods several months after it had entered Polish air space and crashed.
