THE NAKED CITY: IT’S RAINING JUNK!
Image: Skylab spacestation. Image: Wiki commons
Like the ever eroding Amazon rain forest prior to man ever setting foot, the air space around our planet was once a pristine area. Sadly in less than a century it has become a veritable junkyard with millions of pieces of debris orbiting the earth every day. Now and then a piece of this junk plummets back to earth, either through a supposed ‘controlled’ re-entry or by what we are told is an unfortunate accident. When a great hunk of junk does fall from the skies there are varying degrees of reaction and celebration.
Not all space junk has the dubious distinction of actually orbiting the earth. When a rocket takes off it often discards large sections still in the earth’s atmosphere, commonly referred to as ‘launch debris’. When some of these super heavy segments, often up to ten metres long, come crashing down you don’t want to be standing in their path. Luckily they are designed to fall in some of the most remote areas of the planet such as the Altai mountains of Central Asia where over 2,500 tonnes of Russian rocket parts have rained down since the 1950s.
It’s a sparsely populated area but the few villagers who live there have made the best of the manna that regularly falls from heaven. There’s money to made out of the scrap metal, especially the titanium and some of the local farmers have even used bits and pieces of Soyuz rockets to make agricultural tools.
Ever since we ventured into space there’s been a fascination with anything that crashes back to earth. When it’s a controlled re-entry, such as that of the Russian Mir space station in 2001, there is always an amount of paranoia. Will it splash down into the Pacific Ocean as planned or fall onto a heavily populated area?
In the early 1970s, not long after the moon landing in 1969, the world was transfixed by man’s endeavours in space. Skylab, launched by NASA in 1973 was the first US space station and attracted enormous media interest – even more so when its orbit decayed and it was scheduled to come hurtling down in 1979. The global reaction was a mixture of tongue in cheek shock, shameless profiteering through merchandise like t-shirts, caps and Skylab ‘bullseyes’ and, in some cases panic. In the Philippines for example then President Marcos appeared on national television to reassure the public that Armageddon would not eventuate.
When part of the remains of Skylab did finally fall in a remote area near Esperance in Western Australia in 1979, there was massive media interest – both globally and at home. There was an immediate scramble on the part of locals to recover what they saw as highly valuable souvenirs – especially when one American newspaper, The San Francisco Examiner, offered what was then a huge $10,000 bounty for the first piece of the space station delivered to its office. The prize was dutifully claimed when an Australian man Stan Thornton, who had collected 24 pieces of wreckage, flew to the US to collect his unexpected windfall.
Bits and pieces of Skylab soon became worth their weight in gold and the town of Esperance sought to cash in on the notoriety by issuing NASA with a $400 fine for littering. Ignored for some thirty years it was eventually paid, on behalf of NASA, by a local radio station who raised the amount via listener donations. Over the years there has been a consistent trade in Skylab memorabilia and eBay currently has hundreds of items for sale, from commemorative coins to a ‘urine cuff’, a prototype designed to enable astronauts to control their flow in zero gravity.
Now and then, pieces of actual debris come up for auction although verifying what’s real and what’s fake could be highly problematic without considerable forensic testing. A tiny slither of Skylab for example, contained in a Lucite capsule measuring 2.5″ by 4.25″ sold for $650 (US) in 2008. Then again if you want a piece of the souvenir action that is entirely homegrown you can grab a 45RPM disc of Captain Australia And His Mate Downunder singing the poetically titled ‘Skylab Fragment’ for just a few dollars.
Chances are that with all the hardware currently being propelled into space, a second coming of Skylab in Oz is not all that far away. Hopefully it drops in some highly remote area of the country and not in downtown Sydney. Once again, the gold rush will be on to grab that lucrative chunk of space age scrap. Find a ‘urine cuff’ that has actually been in orbit and put to good use, and you will be set for life!
