On an October night in 1992, a rock that had been traveling for millions of years ended its journey in the trunk of a parked Chevrolet Malibu in Peekskill, New York. The car came out of the deal worth more than it had ever been.
The Peekskill meteorite weighed about 12 kilograms. It punched through the back of a 1980 Malibu that its owner had reportedly bought for a few hundred dollars. Rather than a write-off, the dented car and the rock that dented it became celebrities, touring museums and exhibitions around the world.
- Event: Peekskill meteorite
- Date: October 9, 1992
- Mass: about 12.4 kg
- Casualty: one Chevy Malibu
- Origin: natural (asteroid fragment)
Nature versus us
This is the distinction we live inside every day.
A meteorite is nature. It is a rock older than the planet, arriving on a schedule set billions of years ago, and it owes us nothing. Orbital debris is us. It is barely seventy years old, entirely human-made, and entirely ours to clean up. Nature gets a pass. Our own junk does not, and that is the half of the problem Space Waste works on.
The Malibu, somewhere, is still more famous than your car. Space rocks are like that.
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