Dan's Papers -March 27, 2009 - Lost in Space, Almost

Last week, the three men up in the space station orbiting the earth were awakened in the middle of the night by blinking lights and an intermittent buzzing noise. They leaped out of bed. The captain hit the radio button, calling Houston.

"We're up. What's happening?"

"Head for the escape pod," Houston shouted. "Incoming."

WHOOP, WHOOP, WHOOP.

"Can we maneuver?" the navigator asked.

And so, the three astronauts, two Americans and one Russian, scrambled to the underside of the station, opened the hatch and one at a time, wriggled their way into the pod while looking over their shoulders and hoping they were not too late.

And then, just like in a space fantasy movie (Star Wars, Alien III, Flash Gordon), they sat silently in their seats watching the captain lift the plastic cover off the eject button, and then place his finger one inch over the button. They waited for the order to press it. But it didn't come.

This happened last Thursday, March 12, at 12:34 a.m. EST as the space station orbited over Canada.

The astronauts looked out the window of the escape pod to see if they could see it coming. But all they saw was the black sky and the earth and stars, although one of the astronauts, the captain, Mike Finck, said later he thought he felt a ripple. In fact, at 12:39 a.m., the incoming - a piece of space junk 4" wide - went whizzing harmlessly by at a little over 20,000 miles an hour.

They three men waited six more minutes, then, Captain Finck spoke into the microphone to Houston again.

"We're cleared," he said.

One minute later, after Houston concurred, the men were ordered back into the space station and back to bed.

But they did not go back to bed right away. They were too nervous to do that. They paced around for a while - er, they floated around. A piece of space junk, even one only a few inches wide such as this one, would have killed them all instantly if it had made a direct hit on the station. It would have gone right through the skin on one side and out the skin on the other, and in seconds, the space station's air would be gone. Hsssssssss. And that would be that.

Finally, at 1:14 a.m., the astronauts went back to bed.

This is the second incident involving space junk and an operational orbiter circling the earth in just a few weeks. Three weeks ago, over Siberia, an unmanned American telephone communications satellite 10 feet wide slammed into an abandoned Russian military communications satellite nine feet wide. The Russian satellite had been shut down in 1998. It had become obsolete. The telephone satellite went up in 2002. Both were known to be in orbits that crossed. But it was unlikely they would hit. Also, Houston could fire small maneuvering rockets aboard the live communications satellite by remote control to swerve enough to avoid any collision. But nobody in Houston made that order. The collision shattered the two satellites into as many as 1,000 little pieces, each with its own new orbit around the earth. Now there is even more to keep track of. Indeed, there's probably enough junk up there already to keep any aliens from outer space from getting down to us, or at least trying to do so.

Russian space experts chastised Houston for not having the telephone satellite dodge the Russian satellite, which, because it was abandoned, had no ability to swerve. That's what was supposed to happen. Just as it was supposed to happen this time.

Early reports said the four-inch-long piece of space junk was a defective carburetor which a space walk engineer had cut loose with a wrench and tossed over his shoulder, but later reports said that was wrong and it was a heavy titanium ring with a 39-inch wire running out the back. It had been attached to the second stage of a rocket putting a new American communications satellite up into space last year, and a small charge had blown it off the second stage right on schedule.

So everybody knew it was up there. And as with every other piece of junk up there, they had a tracker on it.

Why hadn't the space station been given enough notice to swerve around it? According to NASA spokesman Kyle Herring in Houston, this metal ring had worked its way into a very off kilter orbit, going very high, then very low and in fact showing up on their radar screens only at long intervals with arrival times that each time had to be newly calculated. It had this very screwy orbit.

Apparently, it had just come back into the tracking zone, and Houston had noticed it, but by then it was too late - or almost too late. They might have had enough time to wake the three astronauts and have them blast the space station clear in time, but they did not yet know which way to send them. With its new and latest appearance in its odd orbit, the computers had not had the necessary minute or two to recalculate this latest orbit finely enough to give the space station new coordinates quite yet. And even if it did, the astronauts might be too groggy from just having woken up to make the quick adjustment. God forbid they might turn into the titanium instead of away from it.

Better to just get them into the escape pod ready to blast off.

"Okay Houston, we're outta here. And we're heading home."

And as the background music by John Williams rises to a triumphant crescendo, the space station, behind them, now takes the hit, emitting a fluff of smoke and flame, then slowly spins out of orbit, begins to spin wildly with the scaly-faced, one-eyed, fanged Scrunchulunger inside at the wheel yelling, "What the ..." and then dramatically explodes.