A Minnesota farmer found an 11-foot hunk of charred metal in his cornfield that deputies called space debris, and experts now tie it to a Chinese rocket launched weeks earlier.
On the afternoon of Oct. 14, the Stevens County Sheriff’s Office got a call from a farmer who had stumbled on something strange in a rural cornfield in western Minnesota, about 150 miles northwest of Minneapolis.
Deputies responded and found a large metallic object sitting in the field. In an Oct. 15 press release, the office described it as “presumably a space object,” said there was no danger to the public, and brought in state and federal agencies to investigate and help the property owner remove it.
USA TODAY reported the object measured about 11 feet across, appeared charred in a photo the sheriff’s office shared, and had likely sat undetected in the field for roughly six weeks.
The official identity of the debris is still pending. But space experts cited in the coverage pointed to the upper stage of a Zhuque-2E rocket, a Chinese launch vehicle that flew in mid-September to put a batch of satellites in orbit.
That rocket’s upper stage matches the diameter of the object found in Stevens County. Reporting also noted debris from the reentry was witnessed across the Upper Midwest around the same window.
Stevens County Sheriff Jason Dingman, reached on Oct. 20, said he expected to put out more information the next day. As of the latest update, a full official explanation had not been locked down.
"Agency officials have determined that there is no danger to the public due to this incident."
That assurance came from the sheriff’s office after deputies first examined the wreckage. Agencies were still tasked with hauling it off the farmer’s land.
This was not a one-off oddity. The same reporting listed recent reentries that dropped hardware back to Earth: cargo vehicles and a NASA satellite in March, metallic spheres that turned up in Australia in July, a Soviet-era spacecraft that fell into the Indian Ocean in May 2025, and a SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage that hit the moon in August.
Most of that hardware burns up or lands in the ocean. Some of it does not. When a charred, 11-foot metal object ends up in a Minnesota cornfield, a working farm becomes the cleanup site, and U.S. local, state, and federal crews get the call.
If the Zhuque-2E link holds, the debris trail runs back to a Chinese launch. American taxpayers and a Minnesota property owner are left dealing with what survived reentry. Serial markings on the object may settle the origin; those details had not been released publicly when the sheriff’s office first described the find.
Foreign rockets should not get a free pass to litter U.S. farmland while local deputies and federal teams handle the wreckage.
