A satellite that Samsung used for a PR stunt in which it sent a selfie of model and actor Cara Delevingne into space has crash-landed on a farm in Gratiot County, Michigan.
“This baby fell out of the sky and landed in our yard,” Nancy Mumby-Welke said in a video she recorded of the fallen device. “It’s never boring on the Welke farm. Thank god there’s no horses out or it didn’t hit the house.”
Mumby-Welke told the regional newspaper MLive that she and her husband were about to leave the house to tend to the horses when they heard a loud sound. They went outside to find a four-legged box that was attached to a parachute caught in a tree.
The two investigated the contraption and noticed labels for Samsung and Raven Industries—a South Dakota company that manufactures altitude balloons and agriculture satellite devices.
“Early Saturday morning, Samsung Europe’s SpaceSelfie balloon came back down to earth,” a Samsung spokesperson told Gizmodo in a statement. “During this planned descent of the balloon to land in the U.S., weather conditions resulted in an early soft landing in a selected rural area.
Samsung did not answer if it plans to provide the Welke farm with any support for the inconvenience, but the spokesperson told Gizmodo, “No injuries occurred and the balloon was subsequently retrieved. We regret any inconvenience this may have caused.”
Delevingne has shared three Instagram posts in recent days promoting the “first-ever” SpaceSelfie
For the astronomically inflated stunt, a selfie of Delevingne on a Galaxy S10 Plus was launched into space.
“Tonight, we made history by unveiling the first selfie sent into space. Our relentless pioneering spirit continues to show that amazing things happen on Samsung screens,” said Benjamin Braun, chief marketing officer of Samsung Europe, at a launch party for the stunt. “We continually break the boundaries of what is possible with innovation and tonight’s SpaceSelfie launch is no different.”
The campaign encouraged consumers to upload their own selfies to a website so that they would have a chance to also be featured on the phone which was shown in a video stream that displayed the Earth in the background.
The service was reportedly supposed to last until October 31, but the satellite fell to Earth about three days early.
Mumby-Welke told NBC that she learned about Delevingne and the SpaceSelfie campaign by Googling the words on the heap of space trash on her farm. A few hours later representatives of Raven Industries came and gathered the wreckage.