‘Something Celestial’?

This column could be for those of you who consider yourselves unlucky. But how many of you have been unlucky enough to be hit by space debris?

There is only one person on the planet who can claim that dubious distinction.

First, the example of Skylab, which some readers might recall. If people were ever to have dangerous space debris rain on them, it was in 1979, when the vehicle was to tumble from space. Many people were genuinely frightened. Others made bets about when and where the falling space station would reenter Earth’s atmosphere.

Newspapers offered prizes for finding pieces of debris. Some enterprising sorts even sold Skylab-themed hard hats.

When astronauts had left Skylab in February 1974, they expected another crew to take over. Skylab still carried enough oxygen, water and food to support another three-person crew for several more months, and NASA had tentative plans for a fourth mission to its first orbiting space station.

Before climbing into their Apollo command capsule to head back to Earth, the departing Skylab crew packed a bag of welcome supplies for the next crew. They even left the station’s hatch unlocked on their way out.

But there was no follow-up mission. NASA had not accounted for a spike in solar activity that heated the outer layers of Earth’s atmosphere. This, in turn, increased the amount of atmospheric drag on Skylab. It was predicted that the station’s time in the heavens would end sooner than anticipated.

No one was ever going to pick up that welcome bag.

A NASA ground crew managed to reestablish contact with the computers aboard Skylab in 1978, and in mid-July 1979, they sent a last set of commands to the abandoned station. By changing the station’s orientation as it hit the atmosphere, they could change its path and aim Skylab where its debris would do the least damage. That turned out to be a patch of ocean 800 miles south of Cape Town, South Africa.

Most objects that plunge to Earth get torn apart by the blazing friction of their high-speed passage through the air. But Skylab broke up just a bit slower than NASA’s models predicted. The station was mostly intact until about 10 miles from the ground. Then Skylab burst apart over the Indian Ocean, heading for Western Australia. It lit up the sky with streaks of fire and scattered debris across fields and small towns.

Thankfully, as if we don’t have enough to worry about, space debris scattering across a landscape, even a sparsely populated one, is a rare event. Most de-orbiting spacecraft end up in a wide stretch of the South Pacific known as the “Spaceship Cemetery.” For example, that is where Russia’s Mir space station came to rest in 2001.

It is dark there, because no sunlight penetrates water this deep, and temperatures hover between 2 and 4 degrees Celsius. For ships used to the cold and darkness of space, it just might feel like home.

This is where an unlucky Oklahoma woman comes into the story. What Skylab did not do, a Delta rocket did.

It was in 1997 when 48-year-old Lottie Williams was exercising in a park in Tulsa when she was hit on the shoulder by a 6-inch piece of blackened metallic material. Where did it come from?

A Delta II rocket had crashed into the Earth’s atmosphere half an hour earlier, and scientists at NASA believe that Williams was hit by a part of it — making her the only person in the world known to have been hit by man-made space debris.

Williams had actually seen the rocket entering the atmosphere a half hour before she was hit. She was out walking in the park with friends around 3:30 a.m., part of a regular routine she used to get exercise around her work schedule, when they saw something in the sky.

She later told reporters, “I noticed there was this big bright light, like a fire. I turned to my friends to say, ‘Look,’ and when I turned back it was coming toward us. I didn’t say anything else.

“It was coming over the park, and as it approached us it got bigger. All the colors that you see that come from fire, all those colors were there. It was like a big, huge ball of fire.”

Eventually, she said, the fireball shot off two sparks and disappeared over a building. Williams initially thought she had seen a star: “I thought the two sparks was a star giving birth to new stars.”

She returned to walking but, shortly into her third mile, she felt a tap on her left shoulder. Something hit her and rolled off onto the ground with a metallic sound. She kicked it into the light, then picked it up cautiously and took it to her truck.

The object was blackened on the edges and consisted of layers of a light metallic material. The impact of the thin and light object, which was a little bigger than the palm of her hand, had startled her but didn’t injure her.

Later that day, Williams began making inquiries, calling the local library, then the National Guard. “They thought I was a kook. I can understand that,” she reported.

Ultimately, the U.S. Space Command in Colorado Springs confirmed that a Delta II rocket body had reentered the atmosphere around 3:30 a.m. over the southern central part of the country. There were sightings reported in Texas, Kansas, Missouri and Arkansas. The rocket had been launched in April 1996, carrying a military satellite.

NASA tests showed that the fragment that struck Lottie Williams was consistent with the materials of the rocket, and Nicholas Johnson, the agency’s chief scientist for orbital debris, believed that she was indeed hit by a piece of the rocket.

To Williams, the bad luck was not that she, out of billions of people in the world, had been struck by space debris but that her fragment did not come from a star.

“I was thinking I had something celestial,” she lamented. “And here I got something man-made.”