On this day in 1997, a woman named Lottie Williams was working out in a park near Tulsa, Oklahoma, when she glimpsed a “huge ball of fire” in the sky. A couple minutes later, something hit her on the shoulder and bounced onto the grass. The 5-inch-long object weighed around as much as an empty soda can.
Williams wasn’t injured by this mysterious item, which she later learned came from a space rocket—making her the first person known to be hit by human-made space debris. The odds of such an incident are less than one in a trillion.
In 2001, the United States Air Force traced the piece of burnt fiberglass back to the second stage of a Delta II rocket. That’s a section of a rocket that contains the fuel and engines that blast spacecraft into the cosmos.
This component helped launch an Air Force satellite from California in April 1996, as part of a mission demonstrating methods to monitor ballistic miles in flight. Eventually, atmospheric drag slowed down the decaying stage and sent it hurtling back to Earth.
Read more: “Are We Trashing Earth’s Loneliest Spot?”
On Jan. 22, 1997, the rocket stage whizzed back into Earth’s atmosphere some 42 nautical miles above Topeka, Kansas. It sprinkled debris throughout Texas and Oklahoma, including a 551-pound propellant tank that crashed near a farmhouse in Texas. Some 30 minutes after it pierced the atmosphere, a piece of the rocket tapped Williams’ shoulder.
“I think I was blessed that it doesn’t weigh that much,” Williams told NPR in 2011. “I mean, that was one of the weirdest things that ever happened to me.”
As the rocket’s second stage barrelled back into Earth’s atmosphere, it seems to have heated up to more than 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, the kind of sizzling temperature associated with uncontrolled re-entry. During this process, objects tend to travel over 20 times quicker than a bullet.
In coming years, space rubbish is expected to multiply as increasing numbers of commercial satellite constellations dance around the Earth: The amount of such debris may double in less than five decades, according to a 2025 report by the Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee, which includes more than 10 national space agencies. This growing cosmic dumpster pile could threaten future crewed missions and satellites—and therefore our chances of exploring new frontiers beyond our planet.
Thankfully, it’s highly unlikely to endanger people on our planet’s surface, so stories like that of Lottie Williams will probably remain one in a trillion. 
Enjoying Nautilus? Subscribe to our free newsletter.
Lead image: Dabarti CGI / Shutterstock
