Episode 178: What Goes Up...

my first. I got my first one in at the Chicago Villain Arts Tattoo convention, And while I was there, the artist that was doing that tattoo, that was doing mine had his brother, who was also an artist the booth right next to him, and he was offering It's crazy, Yeah, this is crazy. He was offering free, like twenty minute sessions, free paint tattoos. The taint, you know what I mean, it's the space between your asshole and your genitals. That's

the one right the landing strip. There's many calls or not the landing stripe that's but the runway right to the ass hole. So he was offering them for free. It wasn't for like the whole day or anything, but it was such a such a weird left turn to know this like thing that this guy was doing.

man horrible. I didn't get a Tesla, and I guess partially partially it was you know what, if I am driving somewhere and some asshole who can't separate cool tech from politics sales are bricked through my window or I'm parked at a restaurant and someone keys my car. I don't want to fucking deal with that shit. And it sucks because I really really had my heart set on Tesla, but I still got an EV but I went with

the Cadillac EV. So I got what's called a Cadillac Optic, and it is I'm glad I went with that instead of the Tesla for sure. Okay, so I'm excited. I'm happy. It's still it's not home again because when they I guess, took it off the truck, there were some dings on it, and uh, I said, nope, it's not brand new, so they're gonna if they're fixing it right now, they're doing some paint touch ups. So I have a loaner. But yeah, it was just a horrible nightmare. I turned into a

person that I am not. I am not a person who returns food. I am not a person who complains. I'm a person who understands. People have bad days, things go wrong. You know, people wake up with devastating news, right this, these are these are first world problems that I have. But but I had enough and I went into that dealer like a fucking rage and maniac. And uh, I'm not proud of it, but that's where they pushed me. They pushed me the edge with this shit.

whether intended or not. And I got this idea when my wife and I were watching a new movie called Cold Storage with Joe Was it Joe carry Joe carry Kearney from Stranger Things? You know what I'm talking about? No? Yes, you do? You fucking do?

enters Earth's atmosphere. NASA's Orbital Debris Program Office, through its quarterly newsletters and incidence reports, provided detailed count of multiple re entry events that we talk about in this show. The European Space Agency published technical reports of two of its missions re entries, while the US Space Command and the Department of Defense to classified internal memos and public

summaries related to specific space debris incidents. The Canadian and Australian governments released final reports on separate entry events in their territories. China's Manned Space Agency shared tracking data for one of its decommissioned spacecraft, and the Russian Federal Space Agency issued a technical summary of one of their major control the orbits. So I tried to get incredibly official sources to put the story together.

she works at the White House. In the show, she finds this report that says that a decommissioned Chinese satellite is due to re enter and parts unknown, like, they don't know what's going to land. It's going to land that day. That the day she gets a report, right, and she starts freaking out telling everyone about it and like we got a duck and cover, you know, we gotta do something. And then at some point later on

the episode, everyone in doors. At some point later on the episode, her boss goes like, like, here's about it, and someone else goes, that's just does she know that this happens all the time? Like, no, she doesn't know. No, it happens all the time, and no one's ever been hit by one. Well that's just a TV show though, But apparently in that show, in that world. Maybe at that time it's really right to get hit by one, but it does happen all the time, and there's no cost for our alarm.

up the Earth. We're fucking up space too, and there's some very important orbits up there that we should not be fucking up where we keep very important satellite equipment and you know, reconnaissance equipment and things like the International Space Station, things like this, very important orbits that we are destroying. And it's frightening because you can't. Once they're up there, what do you do. You can't. They're gonna come down eventually, or they're going to destroy something, you know.

than usual. She didn't think much of it. Later, as she walked back to her car, something small and light tapped her on the shoulder. It almost felt like an empty soda can. She looked down. On the ground lay a crumpled, blackened piece of fiberglass about the size of her fist, and it was warm. What Lottie Williams had just experienced was a one in a trillion event. She became the first person in history to be hit by

human made space debris. The object that tapped her on the shoulder was later confirmed to be a fragment from the second stage of a US Delta to rocket, specifically an aerojet Aja ten Dash one one eight K engine section. A year earlier that rocket launched from an Air Force satellite. I'm sorry a year earlier. That rocket launched an Air Force satellite from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on

April twenty fourth, nineteen ninety six, and it spent. Stage had been circled circling Earth in a decaying orbit ever since. On the night Lotty was walking or morning Lotty was walking Interley, the stage re entered the atmosphere at about forty two nautical miles above Topeka, Kansas, scattering debris across Oklahoma and Texas. The largest piece, a five hundred and fifty one pound propellant tank, landed just one hundred and sixty four feet from a farmhouse in Georgetown, Texas. That's

fucking heavy. Five hundred and fifty one pounds. Yeah, but the small, blackened piece that found Lotty's shoulder had spent twelve months in orbit, enduring hundreds of degrees of temperature swing, until atmospheric drag finally pulled it down. The fragment now sits in a drawer somewhere, A souvenir of the only confirmed case of a human being struck. A human being being struck by fallen hand human made space debris now. Jonathan mcdaie Powell has spent decades tracking this kind of debris.

An astronomer astronomer at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, he maintains one of the world's most detailed public databases of re entering space objects. When asked about Lottie's close call, he didn't sound surprised, just weary. Quote. We've been lucky, he said, But when you do this for fifty years, eventually you're going to get unlucky. And that's really that's the unsettling truth here. The situation overhead is no longer

just a concern. It's a full blown crisis. The European Space Agency now tracks forty four, eight hundred and seventy human made objects longer than ten centimeters, about the size of a softcover book. But those are just the pieces

we can see. The true count of orbiting debris larger than one centimeter, a size capable of shredding a space craft, thermal blanket or shattering a solar planel has surpassed one point two million, and for every one of those, there are an estimated one hundred and forty million fragments smaller than a centimeter invisible to radar, but moving with the

force many times that of a bullet. The total mass of this orbiting junk, from dead satellites to frozen blobs of reactor coolant, has balloon to fifteen thousand, eight hundred metric tons, heavier than the Eiffel Tower or three large cruise ships or fifteen eight hundred cars. And take a drink.

In just the first half of twenty twenty five, the Starlink constellation moved to dodge potential impacts one hundred and forty four four hundred and four times.

a runaway chain reaction in low earth orbit. Imagine two large objects colliding up there, say, a dead satellite and a spent rocket stage. The impact shatters them into thousands of fragments. Those fragments hit other objects, creating even more.

almost always after already a big disaster has happened. That's right, how we learn because we're stupid but yeah.

math goes wrong. Sometimes the heat shields they hold, Sometimes the rocket misses the ocean by a few miles, and sometimes, very rarely, a piece of space debris taps a woman on the shoulder in an Oklahoma park. Now, what follows is a brief catalog of debris, both controlled and uncontrolled, that fell from space. Some were designed to come home, most were not. Their stories trace the arc of our species reckless, brilliant, and often careless expansion into the cosmos.

And they also raise a question that no one's yet answered. Who cleans up the sky?

second stage remained in orbit. A dead hulk of aluminum and steel. It circled Earth once every ninety minutes, slowly losing altitude. On January twenty second, nineteen ninety seven, that stage re entered. Most of it burned up, but not all. A small piece a woven composite material from the stage's

motor casing survived three thousand degrees heat of reentry. It fell toward Turley, Oklahoma, at terminal velocity, which for an object that small, is about one hundred miles an hour fast, and that's fast enough to sting, but thankfully not fast enough to kill Lottie. Williams saw the fireball, felt the shoulder tap, and later handed the fragment to the local sheriff. The US Space Command confirmed that re entry window matched the time and location where Lottie got hit, So this

is really it was a piece of this rocket. To this day, she remains the only person to have ever been hit by a piece of human made space debris. The case is often cited as a lucky near miss, but also a warning. As Jonathan McDonell puts it, the probability is low, but the consequence is high, and we're

putting more objects up there every year. End quote that while the odds of any particular piece of debris hitting a person are extremely low, yeah, the consequences of a strike, especially from a larger object or one containing toxic or nuclear material, which we'll talk about here shortly, could be catastrophic. And McDonald's warning is simple. Luck is held so far, but statistics suggests it won't hold forever.

But what happens to Earth is what's kind of realistic and taken in scientifically, I guess as much as you can. And in it it depakes this picture of all the spikes shooting down pieces of the Moon over time, blanketing first our atmosphere and then shooting down endlessly for I think they put in the book one hundred two hundred,

three hundred years straight hitting. You know, I'm not saying that we're getting to that point, but the idea of raining debris would be like bullets being shot from three or four miles up right around four miles it's five. So that's crazy.

It carried US small nuclear reactor, specifically a BS five reactor, containing about fifty kilograms of enriched uranium two three five. You could probably see where this is going for months later, excuse me. Four months later, a satellite, of course malfunction. The reactor failed to separate and boost itself up into a higher what's called a disposal orbit as designed. Instead, the entire spacecraft began to tumble, its orbit, decaying with

each passing day. Western intelligence agencies and media watched with growing alarm. The New York Times called it Russian Roulette in space. On January twenty fourth, nineteen seventy eight, Cosmos nine five four re entered Earth's atmosphere over northwestern Canada. It broke apart, scattering radioactive debris across three hundred and seventy three miles swath of northwest territories Alberta and Saskatchewan.

Some fragments admitted up to two hundred renngins of per hour, in other words, enough radiation to cause acute radiation sickness. The US and Canadian militaries launched Operation Morning Light to find and clean up the mess. Recovering more than one hundred radioactive pieces. The Soviet Union eventually paid Canada three million dollars in compensation, a fraction of the actual fourteen

million dollar cleanup cost. Cosmos nine four remains the closest the world has ever come to a nuclear disaster falling from the sky. And the real legacy of Cosmos nine five four, however, is not the money. It's the fact that it forced the world to recognize that space is not an empty void, but a shared environment, and that what goes up, especially when it contains a nuclear reactor,

must eventually come down. In the wake of the incident, the Soviet Union redesigned its nuclear power satellites to boost their reactors into thousand year disposal orbits. But the older ones are still up there and some are still falling thousand year disposal orbits. Isn't that crazy? It doesn't even make sense.

They conducted experiments in microgravity, observed the Sun, and proved that humans could live and work in space for months at a time. By nineteen seventy nine, though Skylab was empty, it was essentially abandoned due to the combination of budget cuts and major strategic shifts at NASA, mainly focusing energy and funds on the brand new Space Shuttle program, leaving Skylab in a powerless, uncrewde parking orbit.

as a crash zone, but Skylab had other ideas. It broke apart over western Australia, scattering debris across a ninety three mile stretch between the towns of Esperance and Wallina or Wallina. Residents reported large sonic booms and the sight of burning metal streaking across the sky. Some pieces were large, including two ton oxygen tank that punctured a crater into the ground and a lead safe. They had it in quotes, a lead safe the size of a file cabinet, a

filing cabinet. But the most surreal detail emerged days later when a San Francisco newspaper offered a ten thousand dollars prize for the first piece of debris delivered to their office.

Skylab debris however, it's still there. Some pieces were recovered and put on display, others remain scattered across the outback still to this day. I was about to ask, just slowly resting away, Yeah.

reached orbit. Unlike most rockets stages, which are designed to fall back to Earth shortly after launch, the Long March five BEES core stage was placed into a low orbit where it didn't belong, and that's where it stayed for five days. Trackers watched in horror as the stage's orbit decayed. The predicted re entry path passed directly over Los Angeles, New York, Beijing, and a dozen other major cities. This

is a quote. I'd never seen a major re entry pass directly over so many major metropolitan areas, tweeted Jonathan McDowell. Remember he's an astronomer at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and leading expert on space debris and uncontrolled re entries. Now, the uncertainty of the long March five bees Core stage re entry point was maddening, and because the stage was tumbling, its drag profile was unpredictable. Re Entry windows shifted by

the hour. On May eleventh, twenty twenty, the stage re entered over the Atlantic Ocean off Mauritania. Mauritania, it's a country off of northwest Africa. I've never heard of it splashing down far from land in the ocean. No debris was covered, recovered, and thankfully no one was hurt, but the incident exposed a glaring gap in international space law. There's no rule that says you have to aim your trash. China had done nothing illegal, but it also done nothing

to minimize risk. The world held its breath. The long March five bees design had been used several more times with similar uncontrolled re entries. And each time the world holds its breath, and so far each time the rocket falls into the ocean. But so far isn't a safety guarantee.

Its twin, Cosmos four eight two, never made it. A rocket failure left it stranded in Earth orbit, which it circled for our planet for fifty three years, A forgotten ghost of the nineteen seventy space race. Cosmos four eight two was a time capsule of Cold War space engineering. It carried a spherical landing capsule designed to survive Venus's eight hundred and sixty degree fahrenheit surface temperature and ninety atmospheres of pressure, or the pressure of being about point

six miles deep in the ocean. That same heat shield intended for the hell of Venus, also made it capable of surviving re entry into Earth's atmosphere. Not good for decades, the satellite was just an afterthought, one of thousands of pieces of space junk in orbit, but as its orbit decayed, experts began to pay attention. In May twenty twenty five, the European Space Agency issued a warning Cosmos four eight two would re enter within days. The landing capsule, weighing

about one one hundred pounds, might survive. Where it would land was anyone's guess. On May tenth, twenty twenty five, Cosmos four eight two re entered over the Indian Ocean west of Jakarta, Indonesia. The landing capsule's parachute system, designed after fifty three years in the vacuum of space, likely failed. No debris was found. For a few tense days, the world watch a Cold War relic fall home, and then it was just gone. It was a reminder that orbital

debris doesn't care about policies or treaties. It just orbits patiently until it doesn't all right. Number six is Salute seven, the space station that missed the ocean. Salute seven was the last of the Soviet Union's first generation space stations.

Launched in nineteen eighty two, it served both scientific research and military reconnaissance for nine years, hosting crews who performed daring repairs, including one famous dramatic mission that kept the station alive after a total power failure in nineteen eighty six, the new Mirror Space Station had taken its place, and Salute seven was abandoned, but the Soviets didn't just leave

it to drift. That same year, they boosted the vacant station into a higher orbit, a two hundred and ninety five mile by three hundred and six mile perch, where they expected it to remain until nineteen ninety four. They even considered retrieving it using the Bronze Space Shuttle, the Soviet Union's answer to the NASA's orbiter, but the plan never materialized. Bron flew only once, an uncrewed test flight in nineteen eighty eight, and the program was canceled soon

after Salute seven was on its own. Salute seven side was Cosmo sixteen eighty six, a modified cargo spaceship that had arrived in nineteen eighty five, carrying nine hundred and twenty one pounds of supplies and nearly doubling the station's habitable volume. Together, the complex massed forty three tons heavier than a Boeing seven thirty seven. After the final crew departed in nineteen eighty six, Both Salute seven and Cosmo sixteen eighty six suffered major system failures, making the complex

impossible to control from the ground. The Soviets had planned to fire Cosmo sixteen eighty six's engines for controlled deorbit, but the propellants. The propellant supply had dwindled to just one hundred and fifty four pounds, far short of the one hundred and two pounds required for a safe descent. For five years, the dead station drifted. In early nineteen ninety one, Soviet controllers made one less attempt to aim it at the Atlantic Ocean, firing thrusters to lower its orbit,

but the tumbling, lifeless complex had other ideas. The official Soviet news agency, called Tasks or the Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union, insisted that no one was to blame the unexpected increase in solar activity, they said, had made the orbit impossible to predict, but some Soviet scientists were furious. A veteran a scientist who was a veteran of the Military Industrial Commission claimed he had warned for five years earlier that the station lacked enough fuel for controlled re entry.

The director of the Institute of Applied geophysics was blunter when he said, quote, it's insulting to hear the report that solar bursts are unpredictable. That burst was not a surprise at all. Typical Russian cover up, you know. On February seventh, nineteen ninety one, at eleven pm Eastern Salute seven re entering it over Argentina, traveling at more than seventeen thousand miles per hour, the forty three ton complex

left the trail of fire across the night sky. Witnesses described it as a video game come to life, a glowing object that broke it into seven or eight luminous spheres before disappearing. One man in San Juan, stepping to his window to light a cigarette, watched the station disintegrate and thought for a moment he was seeing a comet. A policeman took it and mistook it for a plane

falling in flames. The station split into an estimated two hundred and fifty pieces of debris, with surviving fragments weighing somewhere between two thousand, six hundred and forty six pounds to three thousand, six hundred and three nine hundred and sixty eight pounds. Massive very act numbers of debris. Thinks the debris scattered across hundreds of miles San Juan, Santa Fe, Andre Rios, Venado, Twerto, even as far south as Perto.

I don't know these places. That's where it was. The largest piece, a hatch or bulkhead the size of a washing machine, crashed into the patio of a house in Capitin Bermudez, a town of about thirty thousand people, and remarkably no one was killed or injured. The station's pre dawn arrival around one am local meant that more residents

were indoors, not standing in their yards or in the streets. Today, fragments of Salute seven are on display in museums across Argentina, at the Ouro Verde Astronomical Observatory in andtre Rios, at the local museum in fermat and at the famous UFO Museum in Victoria, which preserves a large piece of the station. Spherical metal tanks, charred and scarred by entry, sit under glass. These strange souvenirs of the night at Soviet space station

fell on South America. Salute seven was a near disaster. It showed that even when you try to aim a falling space station. Space station you can miss, and when you miss, people can die. The fact that no one did was just pure luck.

three little bears. It is like that, but for silence.

across eastern Texas and western Louisiana. The cause was a piece of insulating foam that had broken off the external tank during launch, and it struck the left wing, punching a hole that allowed superheated gas to melt the wing

structure from the inside. Columbia had spent sixteen days in orbit, a science flight that carried seven astronauts, Commander Rick Husband, pilot William McCool, payload commander Michael Anderson, mission specialist kalpan Chawla, mission special list David Brown, mission specialist Laurel Clark, and payload specialists, and first Israeli astronaut Elin Ramon. All seven

souls were lost. The breakup scattered debris across twenty nine thousand, one hundred and seventy four square miles, an area larger than West Virginia, creating a debris field that stretched roughly two thousand miles from the California coast to western Louisiana, a distance the shuttle covered in about seven minutes while still traveling at roughly twelve thousand, five hundred miles per hour.

Recovery teams including the FBI and the US military, fanned out across the piney Woods of East Texas, a region of dense forests and swamps home to wild hogs and bobcats. The largest ground search in US history eventually collected more than eighty two thousand pieces of the shuttle, weighing about eighty four thousand, eight hundred pounds, and that's only thirty eight percent of the show shuttle. The rest was either vaporized or remains to this day scattered in the woods

and swamps of the South. Now, pieces of Columbia are still being found, often uncovered by drought or land development. The FBI notes that its offices still receive calls about potential Shuttle debris, and NASA's Columbia Research and Preservation Office receive about two to three of reports each month, though many turn out to be something else, but from what

I could find. As recently as twenty twenty two, a severe drought in East Texas dried up a portion of Lake Natdochis, exposing a long buried piece of the Space Shuttle Columbia. NASA officials recovered the fragment for analysis a reminder that the disaster's physical traits are still emerging from the landscape nearly two decades later. Today, the recovered fragments are stored on the sixteenth floor of the Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center, the same facility where Columbia

had been prepared for its twenty eight launches. Some of the debris has been loaned to research as to study how to build safer spacecraft components, and a portion is used in an educational program to teach future engineers the lessons of disaster now. The search for the astronauts remains were grim and methodical. Within an hour of the breakup,

the first remains of a crew member were found. Searchers working near Hemphill, Texas, about one hundred and seventy miles north of Houston, recovered a charred torso, a thigh bone, a skull with front teeth, a charred leg, and a finger with a ring still attached. An empty astronauts helmet was also found, potentially containing trace DNA. Nasha initially stated that the remains of all seven astronauts had been recovered, then retracted the statement amid the chaos of the early

identification process. By February thirteenth, two thousand and three, the agency had positively a day the remains of all seven crew members. The remains of the six American astronauts were taken to the Charles C. Carson Center for Mortuary Affairs at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, the same military morgue that had identified the victims of the Challenger disaster in nineteen eighty six, which will cover next and the September eleventh attack on the Pentagon. Israeli astronaut Elon Ramon

was buried in his country. Forensic experts used DNA analysis, fingerprints, and dental records to make the identifications. Remarkably, investigators believe that if the astronauts had remained inside the crew cabin during re entry, portion of the cabin's structure might have shielded their bodies from the worst of the heat, allowing for recovery and identification. The families of the crew later

praised recovery volunteers. John Clark, husband of astronaut Laurel Clark, told the gathering in Texas, you welcomed their family home. For that I could never repay you. The Columbia Accident Investigation Board convened within days of the disaster and issued its final report on August twenty six, two thousand and three.

The board determined that a piece of foam insulation weighing about one point sixty seven pounds that's it, had broken off the external tank eighty two seconds after launch and struck the leading edge of the left wing, damaging the carbon heat shielding panels. But the report went further, exposing a culture of complacency at NASA. Foam shedding had occurred on every prior Shuttle flight and was well known, but management had come to treat it as an acceptable risk.

The investigation also uncovered deeper structural problems. Columbia's wings and fuel tank were found to be riddled with pinholes and cracks, a flaw in NASA had known about since the early nineteen nineties but failed to address properly. Investigators discovered that many of the these surface pinholes were openings to far more extensive breeches underneath, namely erosion that had compromised the

structural integrity of the wings. This was particularly acute for Columbia, which was on its twenty eighth mission when it broke apart. In the immediate aftermath of the disaster. As the nation mourned, the Internet, of course, filled with speculation. Within days, message boards and chat rooms remember those, were buzzing with theories of aliens, booby trapped satellites, and space lasers one communist columnist.

One columnist speculated about a bomb aboard the Shuttle or a terrorist missile intercepting the spacecraft at twelve five hundred miles an hour. Another post suggested that Israeli astronaut Elon Ramon was a Masad agent supervising the retrieval of a spy satellite that had booby trapped by Chinese. One message board asked who shot down the Columbs and proposed that a space laser a weapon system was to blame. Of course, NASA dismissed these theories as highly unlikely, but the rumors

persisted for weeks. The official investigation ultimately concluded that sabotage wasn't a factor. The investigation that followed the disaster led to the grounding of the Shuttle fleet for more than two years, and ultimately to the decision to retire the program in early twenty eleven. Columbia isn't a piece of space debris in the usual sense that we've been talking about. It was a crude spacecraft on a scheduled return, but its fate is the ultimate example of what happens when

re entry goes wrong. Its wreckage, stored in a hangar at the Kennedy Space Center, serves as a memorial and a warning. The atmosphere is not forgiving. And if you guys want to see what happened to Columbia, I left a link in the show notes to that re entry video. It's kind of hard to watch, but it's there if you want to see it now. The next one, of course, is Space Shuttle Challenger, the disaster that grounded a generation. The Space Shuttle Challenger disaster is another scar on the

American memory. What began as a routine launch of the twenty fifth Space Shuttle mission and in a public explosion that killed all seven crew members, including a school teacher from New Hampshire. For millions who watched live, the question wasn't what just happened, it was how NASA could have

let it happen. Space Shuttle Challenger, NASA's second space rated orbiter, had flown nine successful missions before its final flight, including the first American spacewalk of the Shuttle program and the first night launch. The Challenger mission was to be a six day flight with an ambitious agenda. The crew planned to deploy the Spartan Haley Astronomy satellite to observe of Haley's comment, launched a second tracking in data relay satellite,

and conduct dozens of scientific experiments. The Challenger crew was Commander Francis Dick Scobie, pilot Michael J. Smith, mission specialist, Ronald McNair, mission specialist, Allison Onezuka, mission specialist, Judith Redsnik, payload specialist Gregory Jarvis, and most famously Christa mcculoff, a high school teacher from New Hampshire who was selected as the first participant in NASA's Teacher and Space Project. Tragically, the seven crew members would only spend one minute and

thirteen seconds in flight. At eleven thirty eight Eastern on January twenty eighth, nineteen ninety six, Challenger lifted off from launch Pad thirty nine B at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, Wait eighty sixth right, nineteen eighty six. What did I say?

unusually cold. Temperatures at Cape Canaveral in Florida dropped to thirty six degrees fifteen degrees colder than any previous Shuttle launch. Frost formed on the O rings, freezing the rubber and making it brittle. Engineers at Morton Thiacol, the contractor that manufactured the O rings, had warned that the seals failed repeated tests under cold conditions. NASA managers dismissed those concerns.

At fifty eight point seven eight eight seconds, a flickering flame excuse me, A flickering flame appeared on the right solid rocket booster. At sixty four point sixty six seconds came the first visual indication that the flame had breached the external fuel tank. At approximately seventy two seconds, the lower strut linking the right booster to the tank was severed. The booster rotated around the upper strut, puncturing the hydrogen tank.

Liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen mixed and exploded, enveloping the shuttle in a massive fireball. Challenger was traveling at mock one point nine to two at an altitude of forty six thousand feet. The orbiter broke up under severe aerodynamic loads. The crew compartment, still largely intact, separated from the forward fusel lodge and continued its upward trajectory, peaking at sixty five thousand feet at approximately twenty five seconds after the breakup.

Then it began its long fall back to the Atlantic Ocean. The crew compartment plummeted for two minutes and forty five seconds. Think of that a free fall, and they're likely still alive at this point. And it struck the Atlantic Ocean at a velocity of approximately two hundred and seven miles per hour. The impact force was about two hundred g's, far beyond the structural limits of the cabin or any chance of survival. You could liken this force to the

acceleration of a bullet being fired from a handgun. For a human, it means your body effectively weighs two hundred times its normal amount, a force that would crush bones and organs instantly if sustained for more than a few milliseconds.

They went for minutes. The challengers debris field stretched across the Atlantic Atlantic off the coast of Florida, and the crew compartment came to rest on the sandy Ocean floor in about eighty seven to one hundred and fifty feet of water, about seven to eight seventeen to eighteen miles off the northeast of Cape Canaveral. The recovery operation was

the most massive ocean search in history. Navy divers from the USS Perseverer worked day and night, often battling strong Gulf stream currents that covered wreckage with silt and sometimes limited visibility to just six inches. On March seventh, nineteen eighty six, six weeks after that disaster, they found the crew cabin, described by divers as a heap of rubble eight feet high, disintegrated with the heaviest fragmentation and crash damage to its left side parts. Of bodies surfaced for

several days, first Judy Resnick, then the others. A seventh crew member was brought carefully to the surface and Ashore and the Challenger seven were united. NASA confirmed on April nineteenth, nineteen eighty six, that remains of all seven astronauts had been recovered. The remains were taken to a military morgue at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. We just talked

about it with Columbia. Seven funerals were held for the seven astronauts, and an eighth ceremony for remains that couldn't be identified with certainty, plus additional interments for body parts that could not be linked to any one astronaut. A NASA report concluded that the cause of death couldn't be positively determined. The forces of the orbiter breakup were probably

not sufficient to cause death or serious injury. Imagine that, but the ocean impact was so violent that evidence of earlier damage was just it was masked.

Center in Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. Then, less than a year after the accident, the records was buried in two abandoned Minutemen missile silos at Complex thirty one on the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. The silos are ninety feet deep and roughly fifteen feet wide. Massive ten thousand pound concrete caps were lowered into place, creating a weather proof, secure tomb. NASA officials stressed that the debris remains accessible

for future engineering studies. The concrete caps can be removed if needed, but the location of the actual crew cabin those remained is a very closely guarded secret. Why do you think, yeah, I mean that's where because it's just a horrible thing.

they're still pulling this stuff up. The official cause of the Challenger disaster, determined by the Rogers Commission, was the failure of o rings seal on that right solid rocket booster, but the commission's more damning finding was cultural NASA's safety reporting system was so weak that the commission termed it silent. The agency's management structure had suppressed pre launch warnings that

could have prevented the tragedy. Morton Thiakol, the manufacturer of the O rings, first discovered that flaw in nineteen seventy seven and reported it to NASA, but the commission in charge of the Shuttle project ignored it, even after significant erosion of the O rings was discovered during Shuttle flights as early as eighty one. Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynmann f Fineman yet was member of the Rodgers commission.

It grew frustrated with the vague testimony and bureucratic evasion, and in this now sort of infamous moment, he dunked a piece of O ring material into a glass of ice water, demonstrating how it lost all resiliency at low temperatures, removing all doubt about the technical cause of the explosion. And then he accused ness of playing Russian Roulette with astronauts' lives, which they kind of did. And of course, just like the Space Shuttle Columbia tragedy, conspiracy theory surfaced

about the Challenger disaster too. A recurring theory maintains that the Challenger crew members never died, that they faked their deaths or are never on the Shuttle to begin with, and they're actually saying that about Artemist today, that it's all fake, that the astronauts ejected at the last minute. Social media posts circulate photos of people who resemble the astronauts, claiming they're the same individuals living under new identities. A

Judith Resnick teaching law at Yale. A Michael J. Smith as a university professor. A Dick Scope be running a company. Me, that's right, it's awesome. A target. Yeah, it's crazy. These theories are crazy, but people swear.

Of course, the cause was tragically simple rubber o rings and cold weather. One theory that does hold weight. Though it's not a conspiracy so much as a suppressed truth. Is that NASA managers knew about the ol ring flaw years before the launch launched. Anyway, that's not speculation. It's in the Rogers Commission report. And if you want to see, you know, kind of what happened to the Challenger, millions were watching it. It was recorded. I've left a link in the show notes to that video.

Without propulsion, the one ton satellite began a slow, uncontrolled descent. On November eleven, twenty thirteen, it re entered over the South Atlantic over the Falcon Islands. Most of it burned up in the atmosphere, but about twenty five percent, or roughly five hundred and fifty one pounds a debris reached the ocean.

China could sustain human spaceflight. In twenty thirteen, the station was retired. Shortly afterward, China lost contact with it. For five years, Tiangong I circled Earth in a slow, uncontrolled decay, its orbit dropping a little more each day. The world watched nervously as the re entry window narrowed. The European Space Agency published regular predictions, each one shifting by hours or sometimes days. On April two, twenty eighteen, Tiangong one

re entered over the South Pacific Ocean. It burned up almost completely. No debris was found the end. The re entry was so far from land that no one even saw it, but the uncertainty surrounding Tianlong one. The fact that no one knew exactly when or where it would fall highlighted a growing problem. China had not shared its tracking data. Other nations had to track the station themselves.

Ah And while Tiangong one ultimately caused no harm, it's at a precedent for uncontrolled re entries from nations that don't always play nice with international tracking systems.

space travel decades before rockets existed. His stories inspired generations of scientists and astronauts, so when the European Space Agency built its first cargo ship for the International Space Station, they named it after him. The jewels Vern carried handwritten pages and copies of the author's books into orbit, a fitting tribute to the man who dreamed of the journey long before it was possible.

After seven months in space, its mission was complete and it executed a controlled re entry on September twenty ninth, two thousand and eight, over the South Pacific Ocean, and the others followed suit, finishing in February twenty fifteen. Now, unlike most objects on this list, the ATVs were designed to burn up. You see, they had no heat shields, Their aluminum structures melted at relatively low temperatures and therefore

no debris hits the ground. They were a model of responsible behavior, a reminder that controlled re entries are possible if you plan for them. The ATV program set a gold standard for disposal, proving that even a twenty ton cargo ship could vanish without a trace. Program also demonstrated that international cooperation can work. The spacecraft were built in Europe, launched on European rockets, and operated by the European Space Agency.

They docked with the ISS, a partnership of fifteen nations, and when they fell, they were aimed at the South Pacific Ocean uninhabited area, the same spacecraft cemetery used by Russia and Japan, which we'll get into a little later in this episode because it's fascinating, because this place is really cool, and we talked about do you remember talking about this area of the Pacific Ocean when we did the Bump Point NEMO, Right, Yeah, this is all the

same listeners we did an episode talked heavily about this section of the ocean in what the Bloop look up that episode. It's fun.

Each one ended with a controlled re entry, again just like Jewels Vern. The first HDV re entered on November one, two thousand and nine, after a successful mission. The final HDV HDV nine re entered on August twentieth, twenty twenty, after delivering a new battery system to the ISS. Now, Japan took re entry safety seriously, establishing its own regulations for controlled re entries and building redundancies into every system.

Each vehicle could carried multiple navigations systems, backup computers, and redundant thrusters. When it came time to to orbit, the odds of an actual failure were very low, and when the vehicle fell, it fell where it was supposed to, into the South Pacific, far from any ship or island a person. So overall, the HD program, the HTV program was a quiet success story, the reminder that not everything that falls from space has to be a crisis. Okay.

Number thirteen Progress M two seven M, the Russian supply ship that went rogue. On April twenty eight, twenty fifteen, Russia launched the Progress M two seven M cargo ship to resupply the ISS. Progress was carrying six thousand pounds of cargo, including one nine hundred and forty pounds of propellant, one hundred and ten pounds of oxygen, nine hundred and twenty six pounds of water, and three one hundred and twenty eight pounds of spare parts, supplies and scientific experiment.

Soon after reaching orbit, flight controllers lost contact with Progress and the spacecraft began tumbling, and it became clear very quickly that no one could regain control of this thing. For ten days, Progress M two seven M circled Earth in this uncontrolled decay a dead ship with no one at the helm. On May eight, twenty fifteen, it re entered over the Pacific Ocean. The spacecraft was not designed for re entry, It had no heat shield, and it was supposed to burn up completely, and in this case

it did. No debris reached the ground, but the incident highlighted a risk even a routine supply mission can go wrong. Progress spacecraft had flown more than fifty successful missions before M two seven M, but when it failed, there wasn't a backup plan. The spacecraft fell where gravity and drag took it, and while it falling, it fell into the ocean. This time there was no guarantee it would do so next time. Now some background, The trouble began almost immediately.

The Soyuz rocket carrying Progress M two seven M, lifted off from the Bayingcore Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on April twenty eight, twenty fifteen, at seven h nine gmt, climbing through a clear blue sky. Initial reports suggested a normal ascent, but within minutes something went wrong. The spacecraft separated from the rocket's third stage improperly, leaving it about thirteen miles short of its intended altitude and in the totally wrong orbit.

Telemetry later showed consecutive leaks in the occident and fuel tanks of the rocket's third stage, followed by an emergency separation. Fuel leaks from the booster had also occurred, meaning the spacecraft was not only lost but potentially damaged right from

the start. On board video later released by ros Cosmos, or the Russian government agency responsible for the Russian Federation space program Star for All Mankind so ros Cosmo, showed the Earth spinning wildly outside the window, confirming that progress was rotating about its axis. The spacecraft was tumbling so fast that a full rotation only took one point eight seconds. Wow. Right, that is blindingly fast fast. This rapid rotation meant its

solar panels couldn't track the sun, draining its batteries. With no way to stabilize the craft, Russian flight controllers called off the rescue effort. On April twenty nine, twenty fifteen. The US Air Force Joint Space Operations Center began tracking the spacecraft and soon reported forty four pieces debrias along its orbit fragments that had broken off even before re entry, suggesting the spacecraft might have already been coming apart for

ten days. The world watched as the tumbling Progress decayed. The European Space Agency's Space debris Office, led by doctor Holger crag Strong name Yeah Hulger Kraft.

over central Pacific Ocean. Ross Cosmos announced simply the Progress M two seven M spacecraft ceased to exist. Most of it burned up during re entry as designed for a spacecraft with no heat shield, and any surviving fragments fell into the ocean far from land. The US military tracking refined the time of entry to two twenty UTC, still

over the Pacific, and then it was gone. The official ros Cosmos investigation concluded that an improper separation from the third stage of Saiu's rocket, combined with fuel leaks, had doomed the mission progress. M two seven M was not the first progress to fall. In twenty eleven, a similar third stage engine failure caused a progress to crash in Siberia,

but M two seven M was different. It reached orbit before falling, turning a routine supply run into an uncontrolled re entry with a one in two thousand chants of causing a ground casualty, well above the one ten thousand risk threshold considered acceptable for uncontrolled re entries. So let's talk this real briefly. One in ten thousand is an acceptable risk.

home security camera captured the whole impact. The object was a one point six pounds stanchion made of a rugged metal alloy designed to survive extreme conditions. NASA Lata confirmed that it came from a cargo pallet called the Exposed Pallet nine or EP nine, which had been jettison from the ISS in March twenty twenty one. The pallet overall weighed fifty eight hundred pounds and carried spent nickel hydrogen batteries, the heaviest piece of trash ever tossed overboard from the station.

NASA had predicted the hardware were would burn up harmlessly after two to four years in orbit, but instead that stanchion survived and found its way to a house in Naples, and the incident raised kind of uncomfortable questions. Who's responsible when space debris hits a house? What happens when a

planned disposal goes wrong? Now, under international space law, the launching state is liable for damage caused by its space objects, but NASA's a government agency, and the homeowner, Alejandro Otero, has since sued the agency for damages. Arturo said he was shaking and completely in disbelief, adding quote, what are the chances of something landing on my house? Was such

force to cause so much damage? The Naples incident is now milestone the first space debris insurance claim in American history. NASA offered to settle the case on November twenty two, twenty twenty four, and the family accepted with no confidential restrictions. The agency paid a total of forty four thousand and fifty one dollars and twenty two cents to the Taros for their homeowners and their homeowners insurance carrier. Though modest,

the settlement set a powerful precedent. When something falls from space, someone's ultimately responsible. It's a warning to space faring nations and a small measure of justice for a family caught in a one in a trillion event.

the diplomatic veneer, Mirror was a floating catastrophe. It had been built to only last five years. Oh, it was kept a law for three times that long, and by the late nineteen nineties it was falling apart. The station suffered a catalog of crisises that read like a horror novel. A fire that nearly burned through the hole, a collision that punctured a module and sent air hitsing into space, computer crashes that left a station adrift, and a mysterious

fungal infestation that began eating the station from the inside out. Yeah, crazy cosmonauts or Russian Russian astronauts right. Cosmonauts described Mirror as quote someone's very old garage where there's just been stuff put away for years on end and nobody's moved it end. Quote. I love that quote.

every direction. Dense smoke filled the station almost instantly. The flame blocked an evacuation route, so one of the two Suya's escape vehicles. Doc can I hye, please start over.

DNSE smoke filled the station almost instantly. The flame blocked the evacuation route to one of the two Souya's escape vehicles docked at the station. The six crew members, four Russians, one American, and one German, put on oxygen masks and fought the fire for nearly fourteen minutes. The smoke was so thick they could barely see. After the flames were extinguished, the crew spent hours clearing the toxic smoke from the station's atmosphere. Four months later, on June twenty fifth, nineteen

ninety seven, Mirror faced its most dramatic crisis yet. Commander facilis we'll just call him Commander Facili Russian, was remotely piloting an unmanned Progress cargo ship towards the station for a docking test. Watching a monitor and operating a pair of joysticks. He tried to coax the robot ship in for a gentle approach, but then on exis lickably, the Progress stopped responding to his commands. The cargo ship ram

the station at speed. The impact punctured the whole of the Spectra module which contained science experiments and the sleeping quarters of the American astronaut Michael Full. Air began hissing out of the station. The crew scrambled to seal the hatch to Specter, but they only had seconds. In the chaos, they had to sever cables carrying power from Spector solar panels to the rest of the station. The loss of

power was immediate and severe. Mirror lost forty percent of its electricity supply, forcing a shutdown of oxygen generation, water production, lightning, and research work. The collision also knocked Mirror into a slow, sickening spin. The station's solar panels couldn't track the sun, so the batteries drained rapidly For a few terrifying hours. The crew was facing the real possibility of abandoning Mirror entirely.

This is a quote. The first thought was are we going to die instantly because of air rushing out so fast? We can't control it. Full later told the BBC the crew sealed off Specter, but Full lost all his personal gear, his clothes, his music tapes, his family photos trapped in the depressurized module.

control panels, air conditioners, and cable insulators. The fungus was corroding the station's integrity, putting both the spacecraft and its occupants at risk. It was yet another reminder that Mirror was no longer a pristine laboratory. It was a biohazard. Yeah, this fucking movie.

debris fell into a remote area near Nadi, Fiji. It was the largest controlled re entry ever attempted, and it went exactly as planned.

been home in space for a generation. Today, Mirror's legacy lives on in the International Space Station, which was assembled partly from module design for Mer.

the planet. It's truly the loneliest place on Earth, and it's also the world's largest spacecraft cemetery. The South Pacific Ocean Uninhabited Area is not marked by buoys or painted on nautical charts with a special symbol. It's defined by what it lacks land, shipping lanes, and for the most part life. If you doggy paddled or floated on your back at Point Nemo, you would experience a form of isolation almost incomprehensible. The nearest land is more than one thousand,

six hundred and sixteen miles away in every direction. Deucey Island, part of the Piccarin Islands to the north, Motu Nui near Easter Island to the northeast, and Mayhere Island off the coast of Antarctica to the south. All three uninhabited by the way. That means there is no permanent human presence within an area of roughly eight point five million

square miles of open ocean. The nearest humans are often the astronauts aboard the International Space Station, orbiting two hundred and fifty eight miles above the Earth, significantly closer than anyone at sea level. Mine just explit's so crazy.

it's accurate. It's accurate now. The sea here is cold, averaging about forty five degrees fahrenheit, and the depth at Point Nemo is nearly two and a half miles down. Sunlight never reaches the ocean floor. The waters are part of the South Pacific Geyer, a vast rotating current system that is largely cut off from nutrient rich upwellings, so as a result, the region is one of one of

the most biologically desolate in the ocean. Marine life is minimal, mostly microbes and the occasional deep sea scavenger otherwise nothing cool. In fact, Point Nemo is so remote that it has spawned its own legends, And we did an episode on this member the Bloop. So in nineteen ninety seven, deep water hydrophones detected this ultra low frequency underwater sound near the region of Point Nemo, which was called the Bloop.

The scientists dubbed it the Bloop. The sound was powerful enough to be heard five thousand kilometers away, and for years speculation ran wild with a giant squid, some unknown sea monster, a secret military test, wasn't me. The answer eventually is, supposedly, it's a lot more maintain the blue mundane. The bloop is actually a sound of an ice quake, a large iceberg cracking and caving and breaking apart in Antarctica. But the mystery, the mystery just added to Point Nemo's aura.

And again go check out the Blop episode. We covered this extensively.

sent to die, and the logic is simple. As we've seen throughout this episode, large spacecraft do not always burn up completely during re entry. Fragments can survive the three thousand degree heat and reach the ground. If those fragments fall on the city, people die. If they fall in the ocean, no one dies. By targeting Point Nemo, space agencies reduced the risk of a catastrophic ground impact to

near zero. According to NASA, the likelihood of spacecraft degree hitting someone in this part of the ocean is about one in ten thousand.

has reportedly ended its mission in these waters. And in case any people are thinking about savage or doing some sight seeing, don't. None of these spacecraft are intact on the ocean floor. Re Entry is a violent, destructive process. What reaches the bottom is a field of twisted metal, shattered composites and metal alloys scattered across a massive area, rather than piled neatly in one spot. So don't go there.

It's it's a cemetery, not a museum. It's a crime scene where the victims are machines.

fire of a falling space station. Then the water will close over and the silence and darkness will return, And even after the isis is gone, the cemetery will continue to fill more cargo vehicles, more spent rocket stages, and eventually the next generation of space stations will all make the same final voyage. There's no other option. The only alternative to a controlled re entry at Point Nemo is an uncontrolled re entry somewhere else. And somewhere else might

be your backyard. Now here's the thing. Most of the objects we talked about tonight fell into the ocean. Most of them burned up, and few horrifically, But most isn't all. Lottie Williams got tapped on the shoulder by a piece of rocket, a house in Florida got a hole in the truth, a Canadian forest got sprinkled with nuclear debris, and a Chinese rocket flew over every major city in the world and no one could say exactly where it

would land. We're putting more space, more stuff into space than ever before, more rockets, more satellites, more space stations, and we're leaving more of it up there to fall down whenever gravity decides it's time. Controlled re entries are possible, the ATVs, the htvs, the mere deorbit, they all prove we can aim our trash if we want to. But uncontrolled re entries are cheaper, they're easier, and for now

they're still legal. The question isn't whether something will fall, it's it's weather will be ready when it does, And that's all I have to say about that what goes up must come down.

of space infinity. The only thing I'm okay with littering is space because we're all litters in it already. That makes sense to me. But you know, like, how are we not we just focused off. We could just be sending our garbage into space and not to mention all these it's got to batellites and ship It's got to

be cost. It's got to be everything is cost. Everything is the problem with costs, which is something we only impose on ourselves, by the way, you know that, right, We only impose it to ourselves because we.

this thing remotely. That's to put it on the fucking Moon, to control it from all this stuff is in place. Yeah, I know.

they couldn't. They couldn't get along and things fell apart and turned to this whole thing. But I mean the experiments are in place. We're working on that technology. We've been working on that technology. Now it's time we go out there do something.