The Backstory: Space Junk Falling From the Sky

We’ve been watching Artemis 2 and its $23 million dollar toilet journey to the dark side of the moon this week, but you have to ask a question. As we launch all these rockets, satellites, and space stations into the sky... what happens if they somehow come falling back to Earth? Well, it did happen almost 50 years ago, and folks around the globe spent a nervous few weeks... looking up.

Feel free to DM me if you have a story you’d like me to cover... on Facebook it’s Patty Steele and on Instagram Real Patty Steele.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Well, this week, a lot of us have been watching
the sky as Artemis two blasted off with its malfunctioning
twenty three million dollar toilet, and on a more positive note,
has now taken human beings farther than anybody has ever
traveled away from Earth as far as we know. But
speaking of watching the sky, did you ever stop to

(00:20):
think about where all the stuff we send into space goes?
I'm Patty Steel. Maybe more anxiety inducing is this question?
What happens if what we send up comes back down
on top of us? That's next on the backstory. We're
back with the backstory. If space exploration is it at

(00:43):
all interesting to you? You've been watching the blast off
of Artemis two at its ten day trip around the
dark side of the Moon. It's taken four human beings
and their twenty three million dollar toilet farther than anybody
has ever traveled from our planet. What's interesting about these
missions is how completely controlled they seem to be from

(01:05):
start to finish. It seems clear that every individual on
board and working on the ground has been intensely trained
in mission protocol as well as what to do if
anything goes wrong. But hey, stuff does go wrong. As
we know from several accidents in the space industry over
the past six decades. On top of that, not everything

(01:27):
is completely under control the way you'd think. That's where
the astronaut's skill sets kick in. Okay, it's the summer
of nineteen seventy nine, ten years after man walked on
the Moon. People around the world suddenly start looking up
not for stars, not for planes, but for something much bigger.

(01:48):
A seventy seven ton space station called sky Lab is
falling out of the sky, and no one, not even NASA,
can say exactly where it's going to land. To understand
and how we got to this point, we have to
go back even further to nineteen seventy three. Skylab was
all about American ambition. It was a symbol of how

(02:09):
we saw ourselves. Launched by NASA just a few years
after the Moon landings, this thing wasn't just a spacecraft.
It was a home and laboratory in orbit around our planet.
Beginning in seventy three, astronauts lived there for weeks at
a time. They studied the Sun as well as how
the human body would adapt to the space environment, and

(02:31):
above all, they proved human beings could survive in space
longer than ever before. So what could go wrong? Well,
Skylab had a problem right from the very beginning. You see,
during launch, part of its protective shield simply ripped away
inside temperature's sword. For a moment, it looked like the

(02:53):
entire mission might fail, but within days another mission called
Skylab two launched, this time time with a crew on board.
The astronauts improvised for the first time ever, and they
did an in orbit repair on Skylab, saving the station
and turning what could have been a disaster into a triumph.

(03:13):
But here's the thing, Skylab was never meant to last forever.
Over the next six months, three groups of three astronauts
at a time came and went doing experiments and taking
incredible deep space photographs. So the first group, Skylab two,
was up for twenty eight days, the next group, called

(03:33):
Skylab three, spent sixty days on board, and the final crew,
Skylab four, was there for eighty four days. Each crew
member got to take a shower once a week, but
they joked about the difficulty of drying off in weightlessness
and having to vacuum up floating bits of water. In
a little over six years in space, Skylab traveled around

(03:55):
the Earth almost thirty five thousand times. But after that
initial six months, the final crew departed and left the
lab to orbit alone. So what happened next. By the
mid nineteen seventies, Skylab was empty, no astronauts, no missions planned.
It simply circled Earth silently waiting. NASA was planning to

(04:20):
push it into a higher orbit using a future Space
Shuttle mission, but the Shuttle wasn't ready yet. Then a
weird thing happened. Solar activity increased, heating Earth's atmosphere and
causing it to expand, and that created drag. Slowly, almost invisibly,

(04:40):
Skylab began to fall. Now it's nineteen seventy eight and
NASA knows it has a problem. Skylab's orbit is decaying
faster than they expected. They tried to adjust its orientation remotely,
but Siginis later said it was like trying to steer
a falling safe for miles away. The situation kept getting worse,

(05:02):
and now newspapers are picking up the story with headlines
that scream things like Skylab falling, Where will it hit?
Now it's more than a space story, it's a global
story because they have no idea how and where it
will hit the Earth. By early nineteen seventy nine, Skylab
was on everybody's mind. Late night TV guys joked about

(05:25):
wearing helmets. Some people bought Skylab insurance just in case
Debried crashed into their house. While governments quietly prepared for
a possible emergency. NASA released maps showing possible impact zones,
but that was kind of nerve racking because the maps
stretched across huge swaths of the planet. The truth was unsettling.

(05:49):
Nobody knew where this thing was going to land. Then
July eleventh, nineteen seventy nine, the moment arrives, Skylab plunges
into Earth's atmosphere. Friction sets it on fire. The sky
lights up. A blazing contrail stretches across the Indian Ocean
and into Australia. Most of the station burns up, torn

(06:11):
apart by heat and pressure, but not all of it.
Chunks survive. Metal fragments rain down across western Australia near
a small town called Esperance. Thankfully, nobody's hurt, but like
something out of an old sci fi movie, actual chunks
of the space station are now sitting in the Australian outback. Finally,

(06:34):
on a humorous note, the little town of Esperance issues
a fine for littering yup, NASA, the most advanced space
agency in the world, is officially fined four hundred bucks
by a tiny Australian town with a good sense of
humor four hundred bucks for dropping space debris. As you

(06:54):
might expect, the fine went on paid for many years.
But then thirty years later, a djay at a radio
station in California decided to raise the money and pay
the fine on NASA's behalf a joke that turned into history. Fortunately,
Skylab's fall didn't become a tragedy and wasn't even destructive,

(07:16):
but it changed us. It made us feel space was closer,
more real, and more dangerous. Skylab proved something important, particularly
in light of the thousands of satellites we now have
orbiting the Earth. What goes up doesn't always stay there.
Skylab was a warning but also an important lesson for

(07:38):
one strange summer in nineteen seventy nine, and ever after,
we looked to the sky and share the same thought,
what if something up there lands on me? I hope
you like the backstory with Patty Steele. Please leave a review.
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(08:00):
free to DM me if you have a story you'd
like me to cover. On Facebook, It's Patty Steele and
on Instagram Real Patty Steele. I'm Patty Steele. The Backstories
a production of iHeartMedia, Premiere Networks, the Elvis Durand Group,
and Steel Trap Productions. Our producer is Doug Fraser. Our

(08:22):
writer Jake Kushner. We have new episodes every Tuesday and Friday.
Feel free to reach out to me with comments and
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on Facebook at Patty Steele. Thanks for listening to the
Backstory with Patty Steele, the pieces of history you didn't
know you needed to know.