The Sky is Falling

Look, up in the sky. It’s a bird. It’s a plane. Traditionally, that intro would be followed by the exclamation, “It’s Superman!” But it’s 2025. So it probably won’t surprise you to learn that when you look up, there’s a decent chance you’re going to see garbage dropping from the sky. In 1972, a robotic Russian spacecraft called Kosmos-482 set out for Venus. “Cloaked in a protective heat shield, the spacecraft, weighing roughly 1,050 pounds, it was designed to survive its plunge through the toxic Venusian atmosphere.” It never made it to its destination, instead getting stuck in Earth’s orbit. Well, what goes up must come down (and I’m not talking about the Trump economy). Kosmos-482 is expected to re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere by the end of the weekend. No one is quite sure where it will land, but the foremost expert on the topic is generally optimistic given that so much of our planet is covered by water. NYT (Gift Article): A Half-Ton Spacecraft Lost by the Soviets in 1972 Is Coming Home. Space waste landing back on Earth isn’t even all that rare—and one expects the pace to increase as we send more stuff into orbit. “‘I’m not worried — I’m not telling all my friends to go to the basement for this,’ said Darren McKnight, senior technical fellow at LeoLabs, a company that tracks objects in orbit and monitors Kosmos-482 six times a day. ‘Usually about once a week we have a large object re-enter Earth’s atmosphere where some remnants of it will survive to the ground … There are three things that can happen when something re-enters: a splash, a thud or an ouch.'” (I once got almost that exact prognosis from my gastroenterologist.)