After six years in orbit, the 77-ton Skylab station lost its battle with atmospheric drag and disintegrated on reentry, showering fragments across a sparsely populated stretch of Western Australia. The town of Esperance later issued NASA a mock littering fine, which the agency paid decades afterward.
Skylab had been America's first space station, launched in 1973 and visited by three crews who conducted groundbreaking research on long-duration spaceflight. But NASA's plans to boost it to a higher, more stable orbit using the Space Shuttle fell apart when the Shuttle program suffered repeated delays, leaving Skylab's fate to the unpredictable mathematics of orbital decay.
As the station's orbit degraded through 1979, NASA engineers scrambled to calculate where the wreckage might fall, running a global media campaign that mixed genuine scientific uncertainty with reassurances that the risk to any individual was minuscule. Newspapers ran maps of possible debris fields; some enterprising Americans sold "Skylab insurance."
When Skylab finally broke apart, most of it burned up, but chunks rained down over the Indian Ocean and the Australian outback, some pieces later found near the town of Esperance. No one was hurt, but the spectacle became a cultural touchstone about the growing awareness of space junk and the limits of controlling what humans send into orbit. In 2009, a radio host raised the $400 fine Esperance had symbolically issued, and NASA finally paid it, three decades late.