NorthStar Earth & Space’s Luxembourg office said Monday it will lead a second research team funded by the European Space Agency (ESA), this one working out where and when objects re-entering the atmosphere without control will land.
The project, called FALCON (Forecasting of Atmospheric Location and Chronology of Re-entry), will assess where today’s re-entry forecasts fall short and build a framework for probability-based estimates of timing and landing zone. It also covers Very Low Earth Orbit (VLEO), the band low enough that leftover atmosphere drags dead satellites and spent rocket stages back down. The partners are the same two academic groups from NorthStar’s earlier, related ESA-funded project: Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, in Spain, and Romania’s Institutul de Științe Spațiale.
Debris from an uncontrolled SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage came down in Poland in February 2025. Spain closed its airspace over the uncertain path of a falling rocket, an incident independent reporting traces to a Chinese Long March 5B stage’s re-entry in 2022. “This project represents an important initiative in ongoing efforts to enhance the safety and predictability of re-entry events,” Tim Flohrer, head of the Space Debris Office at ESA’s operations centre in Darmstadt, Germany, said in the release.
The release does not say what the project is worth or set a timeline for it. FALCON is the second time in less than a year that ESA has put the same three-way team — NorthStar Europe with the Madrid and Romanian institutes — in charge of atmospheric research feeding into re-entry safety.