When America's first space station came down over Western Australia, the town of Esperance did the only reasonable thing. It fined NASA four hundred dollars for littering.
Skylab weighed about 77 tonnes, and when it reentered on July 11, 1979, large pieces of it scattered across the sparsely populated Shire of Esperance. Nobody was hurt. The local council, surveying a landscape now decorated with American spacecraft, issued NASA a tidy littering fine. The agency never formally paid it. Thirty years later, in 2009, an American radio host and his listeners cheerfully settled the tab.
- Object: Skylab space station
- Mass: about 77 tonnes
- Reentry: July 11, 1979
- Debris field: near Esperance, Western Australia
- Fine: AUD $400, littering (paid 2009)
Funny because it missed
The story is charming because nobody got hurt. The uncomfortable footnote is that Skylab's reentry was uncontrolled. We simply got lucky about where 77 tonnes of hardware chose to land.
Uncontrolled reentries did not stop in 1979. Large rocket bodies still come down on their own schedule, over a planet that is mostly ocean but not entirely. Luck is not a disposal plan. Building real ways to bring dead hardware down on purpose is what Space Waste is about.
Esperance, for the record, has a sense of humor about it to this day. We would just rather the next one not need a fine.
Read the mission →Sources: Skylab (overview) · NASA