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Space Junk Attack

by Dan Rattiner

On Sunday night at 8 p.m., many residents of the East End reported seeing a flash of light followed by a very profound boom, the sort of thing that you might hear when lightning strikes a house down the block.

It wasn't a lightning strike. It was a piece of the second stage from a Russian Soyuz rocket falling back to earth.

Twenty-eight hours earlier, at the Biakonur Cosmodrome in Kazakstan, three men and a millionaire space tourist, Charles Simonyi, were launched up toward the International Space Station aboard a space capsule nestled in the nose cone of the Soyuz. A few minutes into the flight, the first stage fell away and an hour after that, the second stage fell away.

Experts say that where the pieces from these stages come down can generally be plotted by scientists before a launch. In this case, the second stage began breaking into pieces around 10 minutes before the hour, and on the hour, in a great arc between Boston and Virginia Beach, Virginia, the pieces began to fragment and explode as they came through the atmosphere. Pilots aboard two separate jets in the Northeast Corridor reported the streaks of light and sonic boom from some of the pieces at 8 p.m.

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