Thinking of Mir in its death throws, I thought I'd post some sentimental
stuff that I found on the Internet. It is meant to produce a smile. No
offense to anyone please. :~) By the way, Chicken Little, The Sky Is
Falling! is a children's book popular here in the US.
Skylab spiraled down to the edge of the dense atmosphere in 1979. A
newspaper cartoon at the time showed a man struggling with his beat-up car,
hoping Skylab would hit it. (I can relate to this one! Tom)
Multiple pieces of Skylab have been found in the sparsely populated
grasslands of western Australia. Nobody was injured. But the U.S. State
Department received a $400 fine for littering from the authorities in the
town of Esperance, Australia. (Imagine how much that "litter" would be worth
as souvenirs today!?)
(Concerning the deorbit of the radioactive Cosmos-1402---many people around
the world were concerned about the danger of falling debris, let alone
falling highly radioactive debris.) In one example, a $1 million insurance
policy for the crash was sold for $1,000, covering every one of the 250,000
residents in the town of Bakersfield, California. One radio station offered
$500 to anybody who managed to be injured by the spacecraft. One resident of
Tokyo reportedly summed up the situation: "It is a satellite that's
falling...not the sky."
Cosmos 1402 did fall on January 23, 1983, hundreds of miles (kilometers)
south of the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, leaving no known
debris. A large piece of the "Russian satellite," covered with multiple
mirrors, turned up in France around that time, but ({[thorough]})
investigations showed it was a disco ball accidentally dropped by a
truck....
Wish I could go to see Mir do its fireworks show but can't afford it.
Tom
Iowa
USA
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Feb 11 2001 - 12:29:37 PST