The odds of being struck by falling space debris are so small they are barely worth stating. Lottie Williams is the reason we cannot quite say zero.
In January 1997, Williams was walking through a park in Tulsa, Oklahoma when a lightweight piece of charred metal mesh brushed her shoulder. It was later identified as a fragment of a Delta II rocket that had launched a US Air Force satellite the year before. She was completely unharmed, and she kept the piece.
- Person: Lottie Williams
- Date: January 22, 1997
- Location: Tulsa, Oklahoma
- Object: fragment of a Delta II rocket stage
- Injury: none
Mind the denominator
One person in nearly seventy years of spaceflight. That is genuinely reassuring, until you look at what is changing.
The number of objects in orbit climbs every year. Very low odds multiplied by a steadily rising amount of hardware is the math by which a freak accident slowly becomes an actuarial line item. The point of tracking debris now is to make sure that line never gets interesting.
Lottie Williams holds a record nobody is racing to break. We would like to keep it that way.
Open the live tracker →Sources: Lottie Williams · NASA Orbital Debris Program Office