Don’t duck for Skylab redux
REMEMBER when we fretted about space junk from Skylab raining from the sky? Well, spacecraft flotsam is set for a return engagement. Only this time, blame the Chinese.
Chinese officials acknowledge they have lost control over their first space laboratory, a 10m, 9tonne craft that is orbiting Earth 320km overhead. Scientists expect the lab, Tiangong-1, to plummet to Earth in late 2017. Much of it will burn up in the atmosphere’s upper strata, but larger pieces, jagged shards weighing more than 90kg, could survive re-entry. No one knows when this volley from the heavens will happen — or where.
So, will Earth’s inhabitants again find themselves nervously craning necks upward now and then, watching for hunks of fiery steel? Not us.
We’ve always been a nation of worriers. And we’ve always had something cataclysmic to stoke our anxieties: killer bees in the 1970s, mad cow disease in the 1990s, Y2K chaos at the turn of the century.
Skylab exposed our preoccupation with one of our most innate worries: something big and heavy conking our heads. As the day of landfall grew closer (July 11, 1979) scientists regularly put out forecasts on what swath of territory was in peril.
The people with the right preparedness plan were the ones who had none at all. Instead of running for cover, they riffed. One company sold paper Skylab helmets at $2 a pop. There were Tshirts emblazoned with the phrase, “Skylab missed me.”
Where did Skylab finally land? A bit of it plopped into the Indian Ocean, but most of the wreckage fell onto a deserted stretch of Australia, where the population density was less than one person per square kilometre. No one got clobbered. Buildings and cars suffered nary a dent.
The odds of a human getting struck by a piece of Tiangong-1 or any other space debris are about 1 in 3,200, according to space.com. What are the odds you will be that person? One in several trillion.
So, the Chinese shouldn’t necessarily wring their hands over the possibility of hunks of cosmic trash felling bystanders out for their morning jogs.
If nothing else, they can take solace in the meagre price the US was asked to pay for Skylab’s fall from the sky. The Australian town that Skylab shards fell near slapped a $400 fine on the US for littering. If Tiangong falls somewhere between Bangor and Fresno, we can send the summons to the Communist Party’s Central Committee in Beijing.
Chicago, September 27 2016