Lottie Williams becomes the first person to be hit by space junk - January 22nd, 1997

On this day in 1997, Tulsa resident Lottie Williams was struck by falling debris from a Delta II rocket.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
Hello and Welcome to This Day in History Class, a
show for those interested in the big and bizarre moments
of history. I'm Gabe Lucier, and in this episode, we're
talking about one woman's surprise encounter with the outer space

(00:21):
junkyard that hangs above all our heads. The day was
January twenty second, nineteen ninety seven. Tulsa resident Lottie Williams
was struck by falling debris from a Delta to rocket. Thankfully,

(00:45):
she wasn't injured by the impact, as the small fragment
that hit her was relatively light and likely traveling at
a low speed thanks to wind currents. Additional debris from
the rocket was recovered several hundred miles away in Tech,
but thankfully no one else was hit by the falling pieces.
In fact, since the space Age began, Lottie Williams was

(01:08):
and still is the only person on record to be
struck by a man made piece of space junk. If
you've never heard that term before, space junk or space
debris refers to all the clutter in Earth's orbit left
behind by human activity, that includes defunct satellites, discarded rocket boosters,

(01:30):
and even objects thrown out by astronauts, such as personal
hygiene products and unneeded equipment. According to NASA, there are
currently more than twenty five thousand pieces of debris larger
than ten centimeters and more than one hundred million larger
than one millimeter. Many of the tiniest pieces are flecks

(01:50):
of paint released by thermal stress, but since orbital debris
circles the Earth at about fifteen thousand miles per hour,
even a fleck of paint can punch a hole in
a spacesuit or damage fragile electronics. In nineteen seventy nine,
NASA founded the Orbital Debris Program to monitor the accumulation

(02:10):
of space junk and to develop mitigation strategies to reduce
the risk it poses to humans both in orbit and
on Earth. Investigations confirmed that although space junk falls back
to Earth nearly every day, no one usually notices. That's
because the significant portion of the debris burns up when
re entering Earth's atmosphere, and the objects that do make

(02:33):
it through typically fall into oceans or onto sparsely populated
regions like the Canadian tundra or the Australian outback. Those
safe descents are a result of the space industry's coordinated
efforts to de orbit its rocket parts and other defunct
equipment in a controlled fashion. In other words, when NASA

(02:54):
launches a rocket, the orbit of the parts it will
shed has already been calculated in advance to help ensure
that they'll eventually descend in uninhabited areas. It's not an
exact science, but it works well enough for there to
be no confirmed reports of falling space debris ever hurting anyone.
Of course, that doesn't mean it's never hit anyone. In

(03:17):
the early morning of January twenty second, nineteen ninety seven,
Lottie Williams was walking through a park in Tulsa, Oklahoma,
with a small group of friends when she noticed a
bright flash of light in the sky. She turned to
her friends to tell them to look, and when she
turned back, the light was streaking towards them. As the
burning light disappeared over a building, Williams concluded that it

(03:39):
must have been a shooting star. Her theory was seemingly
confirmed a few minutes later when she was struck on
the shoulder by a charred object falling slowly from the sky. However,
Upon closer inspection, Williams found that it wasn't a meteorite.
It was a burnt scrap of woven material measuring about
six inches long. The weight was comparable to an empty

(04:03):
soda can. She later told reporters, it looked like a
piece of fabric, except when you tapped it it sounded metallic.
Williams wasn't sure what to make of the incident at first,
but when she saw news reports of space junk found
on the ground in Texas, she realized she'd been struck
by a piece of a disintegrating rocket. To be precise,

(04:23):
it was part of the insulation that had lined the
thrust chamber of the second stage of a Delta two rocket.
The rocket had been used to launch an Air Force
satellite the previous spring, and the spent booster had languished
in a decaying orbit ever since. Then. In late January,
it finally re entered Earth's atmosphere above Topeka, Kansas, and

(04:45):
then scattered pieces of itself all across Oklahoma and Texas.
Objects made of materials with high melting points were the
likeliest to survive re entry, and that certainly proved true
of the debris that fell on Texas. The largest piece
was a five hundred and fifty pounds stainless steel fuel tank,
which had landed in the front yard of a farmer

(05:06):
in Georgetown, Texas, just fifty meters from his door. Another
sizeable component was discovered in the town of Sageen, a
large titanium pressure vessel that had fallen at such a
high velocity that it had embedded itself halfway into a field.
NASA investigators scooped up the debris and shipped it to

(05:26):
the Johnson Space Center in Houston. They quickly confirmed that
the fuel tank and the pressure vessel had come from
the Delta too, but when they heard about the metal
mesh that had fallen on Lottie Williams, they weren't convinced
it was related. After all, it had been recovered several
hundred miles north of most of the Delta two's debris.
Williams never loaned the object to NASA for evaluation, but

(05:50):
she did send a piece of it to CORD, the
Center for Orbital and re Entry Debris Studies. The aerospace
nonprofit had the mesh examined by experts from the US
Air Force, and they concluded that its composition was consistent
with Delta two insulation, and that the timing and location
of its recovery aligned with the re entry and breakup

(06:11):
of the rocket, because while the fragment had landed far
up range of the heavier debris that fell in Central Texas,
it was still within the predicted field or footprint. It
just hadn't traveled as far because it weighed so little.
Taken together, all that circumstantial evidence was enough to convince
NASA and the Guinness Book of World Records that Lottie

(06:33):
Williams was indeed the first person to be struck by
falling space junk. According to her, The Deputy's Secretary of
Defense sent her a letter apologizing for the incident, but
Williams was less than pleased with the outcome of the investigations.
I was thinking I had something celestial, she told reporters,
and here I got something man made. Her disappointment is understandable,

(06:58):
but Williams still walked away with a pretty cool claim
to fame, and one that nobody is likely to match.
That's because NASA actually crunched the numbers, and, according to
its scientists, the odds of being hit by a chunk
of falling space debris are somewhere in the neighborhood of
one in a trillion, but whether that makes Lottie Williams

(07:18):
incredibly lucky or unlucky is still up for debate. I'm Gabelusier,
and hopefully you now know a little more about history
today than you did yesterday. If you have a second
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(07:41):
pass along any comments or questions you may have by
writing to this Day at iHeartMedia dot com. Thanks to
Chandler Mays for producing the show, and thanks to you
for listening. I'll see you back here again tomorrow for
another Day in History class act to be the