Everything That Goes Up...

For as long as people have had fears, we have been afraid of things falling from the sky.

Palentologists of comedy tell us that this particular danger may have been discovered by a researcher named Og, a colleague of the late Thag Simmons, when a flock of prehistoric pigeons flew over on a day he was late to an important meeting, though if challenged they admit that this is surmise.

Later, study in the field took a wrong turn when a prediction made by one Chicken Little proved to be erroneous. (It was a bad time for science: a boy’s earlier forecast of the arrival of a wolf proved premature.)

Still, over time we have come to realize that objects from above can be harmful. We know to fear objects fired at us by enemies, but they tend to be predictable. Even many of the unpredictable assaults from above at least suggest the need for caution: If you see somebody hauling a piano by a rope on the outside of a building, and if you are wise, you do not walk under it. The superstition proscribing walking under a ladder probably has an historical origin (And may have originated with someone who had experience in the matter.)

But then there are the unpredictable times, when we might get squashed by something no one saw coming.

Alvin Rodecker could not have expected that June 23, 1960 would be his last day, but it was. Rodecker and his wife, from Detroit, were making a gourmet vacation of visiting fine restaurants in New York. They had just finished their midday meal and had left the restaurant. Eight stories above, a maid was cleaning the apartment of game show and radio celebrity Arlene Francis. A dumbbell that had been used to anchor something on the window sill rolled out the window, fell end over end the eight stories, and struck poor Rodecker, killing him instantly. Some things can be attributed only to very bad luck.

The stegosaurus who consigned Thag Simmons to happy memory may itself, we are told, have met its eternal reward when, it is believed, a very big rock fell from the sky and hit the earth on the Mexican side of what was up to that time known as the Gulf of Terrible Lizards.

We don’t typically worry too much about that sort of thing because it doesn’t happen often, though we do pay attention and we endeavor to sort out what we might do to protect ourselves.

We’ve gotten fairly good — though not entirely reliable — at locating celestial bullets aimed at or near us. There is, for instance, a 200-foot, more or less, rock called Asteroid 2024 YR4 that has in the neighborhood of a 4 percent chance of whacking into the moon three days before Christmas 2032. If it were to hit the moon, it would make a dent about a half-mile wide and might eject moon rocks capable of entering our atmosphere, where they would most likely burn up spectacularly.

If it were to hit earth, which no one is predicting, we have some strong hints as to the result. In Arizona, a east west of Flagstaff, there’s a very well preserved meteor crater — known by the imaginative name, “Meteor Crater” — made by a big hunk of iron and nickel 150 feet in diameter about 50,000 years ago. It’s three-quarters of a mile in diameter and more than 500 feet deep. (It is owned, hilariously I think and no, I’m not making this up, by The Barringer Crater Company. I believe they own just the one crater.)

Anyway, if when it hit you were a giant ground sloth standing on the corner in Winslow, Arizona, 18 miles away, that day would most likely have been your last. The instant the meteor became a meteorite about 20 megatons of explosive force got released, so it’s not something to take lightly.

(Arizona is a fascinating place, and not that far to the east of Meteor Crater is the Petrified Forest, as stunning in its own way as is the crater. There, there is literally a forest of large, knocked-down trees. If you look closely you’ll see the rings and other physical attributes of normal dead trees, except that they are made of colorful minerals. There are relatively few twigs and branches, leading one to suspect that whatever knocked them down was violent, almost as if, say, a 160-foot meteorite had crashed down a few miles away. Alas, no. Whatever did in the now-petrified forest did its job 225 million years ago. I know. I was disappointed, too.)

Anyway, this kind of thing, a meteor spattering into our planet, does happen from time to time. On June 30, 1908 an asteroid of about the size we’re discussing blew up over Siberia. It flattened nearly 900 square miles of forest and released a huge amount of energy, roughly equivalent to that of the Arizona meteor’s arrival. We know it blew up in the air because there is no crater. Many weird theories resulted. A dozen years ago, another rock, but not as big, only 60 feet or so, went bang over Chelyabinsk, Russia. We have video of that one. Its explosion could be measured in kilotons, 500 or so of them, which is 30 Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs. so tweren’t no firecracker. It damaged more than 7,000 buildings and sent more than a thousand people to the hospital, most of them diced by glass broken in the shockwave. Window replacement contractors began to plan vacations at Black Sea dachas.

What was most troublesome, unless they were your windows, is that nobody saw it coming. A rock that size in, say, New York City, would instantly bring about the first phase of citywide urban renewal.

I had actually written about such a possibility, in a piece for National Review in 2004. It described the nature of the danger and the difficulty in doing anything to prepare once the asteroid has gotten close. As I wrote then:

“I had the opportunity to discuss the threat of an asteroid strike with Edward Teller, the atomic scientist, about 15 years ago. Teller was already championing development of a system to launch thermonuclear devices into space to explode near and change the course of space objects headed for Earth. Contrary to the assumption fostered by decades of science-fiction movies, we do not have silos full of rockets that could be pointed at such an object and lit off, solving the problem after a few minutes of tension. Rockets designed to deliver a warhead to another part of our planet are not capable of taking their bombs beyond Earth’s gravity. And their guidance systems are not up to the task, either: Moscow, it was assumed, would sit still. Asteroids don’t. They move around.

“Teller thought an anti-asteroid defense was ‘essential; it would be irresponsible in the extreme for us not to act.’ Technology being invented for the Strategic Defense Initiative, he said, could be adapted. We would need to build the appropriate rockets, decide how they would be deployed, and calculate their effect. It would be neither cheap nor easy, but possible, he said, and more than justified by the threat.”

The New York Times had stirred up a fuss in 1991 by way of a statistical stunt. It said your chances of being killed by an asteroid are greater than your chances of dying in an airplane crash. That’s true, spread over, say, a million years, because an asteroid, should it hit, would probably kill pretty much everybody. But in any given year people do die in plane crashes and don’t get whacked by boulders from space. Most of the time, asteroids left dinosaurs to go about their business. Nevertheless, there is a real danger. It’s not likely today or tomorrow, but given enough time it is nearly certain. Reports of scientists being surprised by asteroids passing uncomfortably close, unnoticed until it’s to late, are not rare.

There are smaller dangerous rocks, too. On November 30, 1954, Ann Hodges was resting on her couch in Alabama when a meteor the size of a brick crashed through the roof, bounced around a little, and smashed into her side, leaving a bruise the size of a football. There are claims of two meteorites hitting houses in Georgia (the state), one in 2009 and one on June 26, a little over three months ago. And one hit a car in Peekskill, New York, in 1992. The car has its own website. Really.

But now we have another problem, related but different. It is space debris, the stuff we put up there.

In late spring 1979, there was much nervous humor about where the Skylab “space station” would crash. Last occupied five years earlier, the thing was basically the third stage of a Saturn V rocket, rendered surplus when the final Apollo flights to the moon got canceled. It had a lot of heavy equipment aboard, so it weighed almost 170,000 pounds. Due to unexpected solar activity, its orbit began to decay. So it became a guessing game as to when and where it would come down. Newspapers had pictures of people wearing fanciful home-made helmets and doing other silly things as protection from getting squashed by Skylab. It finally came down in pieces, mostly over Western Australia, on July 11.

It isn’t the only time stuff we put into obit has crashed back to earth. And it is getting worse.

Most space junk burns up on re-entry. But that’s not necessarily good news.

Day before yesterday I read a fascinating but frightening story published in The Register, a pleasingly irreverent technical publication. It said that there’s belief our upper atmosphere is getting filled with the poisonous smoke from burnt-up satellites and related stuff.

Satellites, spent rocket boosters, and other space junk are not made of things you want to breathe. And they are returning to the atmosphere at an alarming rate. An example cited: Elon Musk’s Starlink space internet service loses on average two satellites each day to earth’s undeniable attraction. The rate is such that Starlink’s enormous swarm is expected to be replaced every five years. And Starlink is one of the few responsible outfits in the space launch business. We don’t know how Amazon’s space-based internet is doing nor, especially, China’s. China also has a tendency to leave lots of junk in orbit, as do the Russians.

In due course, some of it will start banging together, creating an effect a little like a cue ball in billiards: pieces will fly everywhere. The possibility of a serious chain reaction is known as the Kessler effect: there is so much stuff in orbit banging into other stuff in orbit that it creates new bits of debris, so that whether a satellite or space flight can avoid it all becomes a matter of luck.

Nor is that the worst of it. The biggest danger is in higher orbit than Starlink’s little satellites. There, a world of junk going back as far as the Soviet era tumbles aimlessly. They are a danger to other spacecraft and unpredicted events, such as a bad season of solar flares, could change their various orbits, sending them to follow Skylab, though not necessarily to Australia.

“According to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, around 10 percent of the aerosol particles in the stratosphere (the second layer of Earth's atmosphere where the ozone layer lives) contain aluminum and exotic metals believed to be from rockets and satellites that have burned up on reentry,” wrote Brandon Vigliarolo. “NOAA believes that number could grow to as much as 50 percent as space launches and reentries increase.”

What does it mean? Dunno. But remember what aerosol deodorant is claimed to have done to the upper atmosphere. It was once, until it wasn’t, blamed for changes to the climate.

Og would say he tried to warn us.