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A hunk of space junk crashed through a Florida man's roof. Who should pay to fix it?

"It was not like anything I had ever seen before," Alejandro Otero says. It turned out his home was hit by debris from the International Space Station that had been circling the Earth for three years.

toggle caption NASA "The location of the reentry was predicted by the 18th Space Defense Squadron to be in the Gulf of Mexico," the Aerospace Corporation, a research and development nonprofit that advises the U.S. government, said in a statement to NPR. The agency is working to figure out how part of it hit Otero's house, adding that it may need to tweak the engineering models it uses to to estimate how objects break up during atmospheric reentry. The International Space Station, which is roughly the size of a football field, is itself the subject of a "deorbit" plan, as it nears the end of its useful life after more than two decades of continuous human occupancy.

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