What was the national hype over a NASA Satellite hitting the earth.

[recto101]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44632366/ns/technology_and_science-space/

Wait doesn't NASA decommissioned satellites hit the earth every few years. I never heard of a Nasa Satellite killing anybody on the ground? However I heard of people being killed on board the space shuttle in 1986 and 2003. I heard that Hubble is supposed to land in 2012-2013 after its 23 year run.

 

[cd637299]

Well ISTR a time when---what was it---Skylab?---broke into pieces and fell toward earth, and everybody was concerned where it would fall. It did land, somewhere in Western Australia, IIRC.

Can't remember the year, wanna say 1983ish.

cd

 

[1st of 5]

Skylab fell out of orbit in the summer of 1979. Pieces of it hit somewhere in western Australia and some teenager won a big prize for finding a chunk.

 

[nocomradio]

Some chunks of NASA and other countries' debris do come down, but this one is a particularly large chunk at roughly the size of a transit bus. Given that size, not all of it will burn up and therefore some substantial chuncks could make it through to the earths' surface and somewhere populated at that.

There also is no control over this re-entry. Skylab and a few others have had some fuel left to maneuver them into a controlled decaying orbit with some ability to put them down in the ocean or very remote area.

 

[MarcB]

While the odds of something falling from the sky and actually hitting and killing someone is astronomical, it was how one of the lead characters on the TV Show "Dead Like Me" died. A toilet (or toilet seat) from the International Space Station fell to the earth and killed her.

 

[JeeperOne]

And didn't the MIR space station crash land into the Pacific Ocean?

No hype about that crash landing on land

Cheers

 

[LynnW]

And didn't the MIR space station crash land into the Pacific Ocean?

No hype about that crash landing on land

Cheers

The Mir had fuel on board so it's descent could be controlled.