UARS fell out of orbit apparently off the US west coast, yesterday at about the same time a similar fate overtook our server, preventing timely updates On current estimates NASA expects the 5900 kilogram UARS satellite to plunge out of orbit into the Pacific ocean west of Chile in the afternoon local time or about […]

UARS fell out of orbit apparently off the US west coast, yesterday at about the same time a similar fate overtook our server, preventing timely updates

On current estimates NASA expects the 5900 kilogram UARS satellite to plunge out of orbit into the Pacific ocean west of Chile in the afternoon local time or about 6 am Saturday morning eastern Australian time.

It is one of the larger uncontrolled atmospheric re-entries of a satellite or rocket booster since the 77 tonnes Skylab crashed to earth early on the morning of 12 July 1979, dropping hundreds of pieces of hot wreckage over a debris trail that stretched from Esperance to points inland on a heading toward Kalgoorlie.

Even in what is almost certainly its last day in orbit, there is considerable uncertainty as to where the Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite, released from a Space Shuttle in 1991, will come down, but it is calculated to drop several dozen substantial pieces of wreckage all the way down to the surface along a 500 kilometres long track, and updates from NASA can be found here.

These days most shorter term heavy non-reusable satellites are de-orbited with precision toward a dump zone in the mid Pacific well past Fiji.

On the night Skylab fell to earth I was covering Skylab’s last days for the Sydney Morning Herald. The three scheduled editions came out, each one with a page one story updated to include the latest information, as it became clear that the first ever manned space station which had been in orbit since May 1973 would cross Australia several times during what had to be its last hours in space.

The final planned edition (dated 12 July) went out on the trucks from Jones Street around midnight on Wednesday, 11 July, without Skylab having come down, despite wildly varying predictions from NASA as to where the risks were highest, including warnings of a likely re-entry at one stage into the busy North Atlantic air routes.

That night Skylab was sharing the top of Page 1 with a Telecom industrial dispute that meant it was nearly impossible to get long distance phone calls.

But the Federal Government had set up a Skylab Communications Centre in Canberra manned by the National Disaster Organisation, and it had the power to make emergency broadcasts and ground aircraft, among other things.

The person behind its formation, Senator James Webster, Minister for Science and the Environment, was ‘the’ contact, who I had accompanied on a historic flight from McMurdo Sound to Lanyon Junction near the Casey Base early in the year (as well as to the South Pole) as part of an inquiry into the siting of a permanent ice or snow runway for direct flights from Australia to its Antarctic territory.

Before normal going home time in the Herald newsroom we had seen the final edition of the SMH rival the Daily Telegraph, with a page one story that described in inverted commas how unnamed witnesses in an unnamed location had seen Skylab crash to earth in a ball of flame.

It was a dismal insult to its readers. I managed to get a call through to the Skylab centre. Yes, Skylab was still up there, but surely not for much longer.

The only other person in the news room was Alan Dobbyn, the editor. We decided to hang about because Skylab was on a course to cross Australia one more time in the early hours of Thursday morning, starting from a point near Esperance.

Less than an hour and a half later the phone rang. The duty officer at Skylab coms in Canberra said “It’s still coming.” NASA had set the space station tumbling with the last few ounces of thruster propellant to try and ensure it dropped into the southern ocean between South Africa and Western Australia, but it had done a dam-buster bomb, and was skipping across the top of the thin atmosphere like a rock skipping across water, too low to stay in orbit, but still too fast to quickly fall.

The emergency centre had grounded several flights due to leave Perth around midnight over there, the red-eye specials to Sydney and Melbourne, and radio stations were warning listeners in in the south west of WA that the moment of re-entry was fast approaching, at around 28,000 kmh.

A phone on one of the empty news desks rang. It was a constable P. Giles of Esperance police, describing the blinding light, and the sonic boom that followed.

Other calls quickly followed. A Telecom engineer, Brett Turner 21, near Esperance, said “We were looking up in the sky when suddenly we saw it. It was right over us. All these lights suddenly appeared and broke up into more smaller lights.

“They were all white and blue and about two and a half minute later a tremendous roar of thunder broke out.”

Dobbyn and I headed downstairs to the compositor room, to ‘the stone’. I dictated changes to the previous version of the story directly into hot metal, much of which had been co-authored earlier in the day with Richard Macey in Canberra and Mike Steketee, who was the SMH correspondent in Washington DC.

Alan did the layout changes, wrote a new street poster, and told me the number of pars needed for the page one remake to fit in the interviews with eye-witnesses.

We did a SPECIAL EDITION, a 60,000 copy print run, that hit the streets before 5 am, SKYLAB CRASHES IN WA. The real story. Our story alone.

It was one of the better as well as latest of my nights at Granny.

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