Space lawsuits are a small but revealing category of litigation: disputes over falling debris, broken contracts, government procurement, unlicensed launches, and even an attempt to charge NASA rent on an asteroid. The cases below are the ones that have actually been filed, decided, or settled, and together they show how courts and agencies handle conflicts that older treaties and ordinary tort law were never designed to resolve.
NASA Sued After Space Station Debris Hit a Florida Home
On March 8, 2024, a metallic cylinder punched through the roof of Alejandro Otero’s home in Naples, Florida, tore through the ceiling, and cracked the floor. Otero’s son Daniel was in the house at the time. The object weighed about 1.6 pounds and measured roughly four inches long. NASA later confirmed it was a support structure from a cargo pallet of used nickel-hydrogen batteries jettisoned from the International Space Station in March 2021.
That pallet, Exposed Pallet 9, weighed nearly 2.9 metric tons and was the heaviest object ever deliberately released from the station. NASA had predicted roughly half a ton of fragments would survive reentry, yet allowed the pallet to deorbit naturally rather than guiding it to a remote ocean area.
In May 2024, attorney Mica Nguyen Worthy of Cranfill Sumner LLP filed a claim against NASA on behalf of the Otero family under the Federal Tort Claims Act, seeking more than $80,000 for uninsured property damage, business interruption, emotional distress, and the cost of hiring third-party consultants. Worthy argued publicly that NASA should apply the “absolute liability” standard from international space law rather than forcing American citizens to prove negligence under domestic rules.
NASA had six months to respond under the FTCA. The agency chose to settle before any lawsuit was filed, resolving the matter with both the family and their insurance company at what a later profile described as the highest levels of the agency.
The case set no judicial precedent, but it confirmed that the FTCA is a workable path for Americans hit by falling space hardware. It also exposed a gap in the 1972 Convention on International Liability for Damage Caused by Space Objects: Article VII excludes damage to a launching state’s own nationals, so the Otero family, as U.S. citizens harmed by a U.S. object, had no treaty remedy at all.
Blue Origin v. NASA Over the Lunar Lander Contract
In April 2021, NASA awarded a single $2.9 billion contract to SpaceX to build the Human Landing System for the Artemis program. Blue Origin, founded by Jeff Bezos, had expected NASA to pick two providers and lost outright. Its bid had come in at roughly $6 billion, more than double SpaceX’s price.
Blue Origin protested first to the Government Accountability Office, arguing that NASA had disregarded flight safety requirements and unfairly changed its approach after Congress funded only a quarter of the requested amount. The GAO acknowledged SpaceX’s proposal lacked the required number of Flight Readiness Reviews but denied the protest in July 2021, finding no competitive prejudice.
Blue Origin then sued in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims in August 2021, alleging NASA waived material solicitation requirements for SpaceX, conducted unequal discussions, and breached an implied duty of good faith. Judge Richard Hertling dismissed the case on November 4, 2021.
The court’s reasoning was blunt. Blue Origin lacked standing because it never had a substantial chance of winning: its proposal was priced well above NASA’s available funding and was itself noncompliant with the solicitation. The argument that Blue Origin would have submitted a cheaper proposal had it known NASA’s constraints was called “speculative and unsupported by the record.” Post-award offers to contribute $2 billion to $3 billion of the company’s own money were not part of the original bid, and NASA had no obligation to consider them. Even setting standing aside, the court found NASA’s evaluation thorough and within its discretion. Bezos acknowledged the loss publicly, saying it was “not the decision we wanted” but that the company respected the ruling. NASA resumed work with SpaceX immediately.
Nemitz v. NASA: The Asteroid Parking Ticket
In February 2001, NASA’s NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft touched down on asteroid 433 Eros, the first-ever landing on an asteroid. Gregory Nemitz, an online entrepreneur in Carson City, Nevada, had registered a property claim to Eros through an internet celestial registry before the landing. He invoiced NASA for a $20 parking and storage fee covering one century of occupancy, plus late charges.
NASA general counsel Edward Frankle rejected the invoice, writing that the claim “appears to have no foundation in law.” Nemitz sued anyway. In April 2004, the U.S. District Court in Reno dismissed the case for lack of a recognizable legal theory, and the Ninth Circuit affirmed in February 2005, finding Nemitz had failed to establish any “legally cognizable property interest” in the asteroid.
The dismissal was straightforward, but the underlying question is not. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty declares space “the province of all mankind,” and the International Institute of Space Law maintains that private deeds to celestial bodies convey no legal rights. As commercial interest in asteroid mining has grown, who can own what in space remains unresolved.
McPike v. Space Adventures: A $7 Million Moon Ticket
In March 2013, Austrian billionaire Harald McPike signed a contract with Space Adventures, a Virginia-based company that had previously brokered trips to the International Space Station, for a seat on a proposed circumlunar Soyuz mission. The ticket was priced at $150 million. McPike paid a $7 million deposit.
The lunar flight never happened. McPike grew skeptical that Space Adventures had a formal agreement with Roscosmos to actually provide the mission, and he declined to pay a second $8 million installment. Space Adventures terminated the agreement in March 2015 and kept the deposit. McPike sued in May 2017 in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, alleging breach of contract and fraud.
Lawyers for Space Adventures described the deal in filings as the purchase of “an opportunity” rather than a guaranteed seat, arguing the contract’s terms made clear: “You have to pay as you go, you don’t get your money back, and nothing is guaranteed.” After two years of litigation and significant discovery battles, the parties settled in 2019. The terms were sealed, both sides paid their own legal costs, and whether any of McPike’s $7 million was returned remains unknown.
FCC Enforcement Against Swarm Technologies
In December 2017, the FCC denied a license application from Swarm Technologies, a small satellite startup, because its tiny “SpaceBee” satellites were too small for ground-based tracking systems to reliably monitor. The agency considered them a collision hazard. Swarm launched the four satellites anyway the following month, hitching a ride on an Indian PSLV rocket in January 2018.
The FCC revoked a previously granted license for a separate Swarm launch and opened a formal investigation. In December 2018, Swarm agreed to a consent decree requiring a $900,000 payment to the U.S. Treasury and a three-year reporting obligation: the company had to notify the FCC within five days of signing any future launch agreement and at least 45 days before a planned launch.
Rosemary Harold, then chief of the FCC’s Enforcement Bureau, said the action reinforced that companies must obtain authorization before deploying communications satellites, calling these obligations essential to “protect other operators against radio interference and collisions.” The case remains the clearest signal that the FCC will impose real financial consequences on companies that treat launch licensing as optional.
Canada v. the Soviet Union: The Only Successful International Claim
In January 1978, the Soviet satellite Cosmos 954, carrying a nuclear reactor, broke apart over northern Canada, scattering radioactive debris across 124,000 square kilometers of the Northwest Territories. Canada’s cleanup, called Operation Morning Light, cost $14 million.
Canada filed a formal claim against the Soviet Union in January 1979, relying on the 1972 Liability Convention and the Rescue and Return Agreement. The claim sought only incremental costs, excluding items like the regular salaries of government employees involved in the response. After extended diplomatic negotiations, the two countries signed a settlement protocol in Moscow on April 2, 1981. The Soviet Union paid Canada three million Canadian dollars as “full and final settlement of all matters connected with the disintegration of the Soviet satellite Cosmos 954.”
Canada received roughly half of what it asked for, and the outcome was shaped as much by Cold War politics as by legal analysis. More than four decades later, Cosmos 954 remains the only successful claim ever brought under the Liability Convention.
What These Cases Reveal About Space Law
The disputes above fall into predictable categories once you line them up. Damage on the ground from falling hardware gets handled through domestic tort law when it happens inside the launching state, because the 1972 Liability Convention excludes a state’s own nationals from its reach. Procurement fights over space contracts follow ordinary federal contracting rules, and bidders without a realistic chance of winning cannot overcome them with later concessions. Property claims to celestial bodies have no legal basis American courts will recognize. Contract disputes between private parties over spaceflight services are resolved like any other commercial litigation, often behind sealed settlements. Regulatory violations by launch operators are prosecuted administratively, with consent decrees and fines rather than courtroom trials.
The international framework, meanwhile, has been invoked successfully exactly once. The Liability Convention requires proof of fault for collisions in space without defining fault, routes claims through state-to-state diplomatic channels that governments are reluctant to use, and offers no remedy beyond money damages. Recent incidents reinforce the pattern. In February 2025, a SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage made an uncontrolled reentry over Poland, dropping a charred tank onto a warehouse in Komorniki and damaging property. No formal diplomatic claim was filed. In December 2024, an 1,100-pound metallic ring crashed into Mukuku village in Kenya; the head of Kenya’s space agency acknowledged launching-state liability under international law but noted the difficulty of tracing debris to a specific vehicle. SpaceX Starlink and Crew Dragon fragments landed on Saskatchewan farms throughout 2024, and the company paid farmers directly, including $3,900 to one farmer near Hodgeville. Those payments were voluntary; Canada did not file a treaty claim.
For now, anyone harmed by space activity has a narrow and uneven set of options. If you are a U.S. resident hit by U.S. hardware, the Federal Tort Claims Act is the realistic path, and NASA has shown it will settle rather than litigate. If you are a losing bidder on a NASA contract, the GAO and the Court of Federal Claims are available, but the standing bar is high. If you have a private commercial dispute with a space company, you are in ordinary civil court. And if you are a foreign government whose territory has been hit, the Liability Convention is on the books, but the Cosmos 954 settlement remains the only time it has produced a payment.