Dan's Papers - April 10, 2009 - RUSSIAN VISITOR EXPLODES OVER 3 MILE HARBOR

In all the years I have been writing this newspaper, I never have written about all the space junk thrown off by the various rockets and satellites. The first ones went up 40 years ago. That's a long time. Since January, however, I have written about space junk twice, both times because of problems with it.

In January, two communications satellite dishes collided over Siberia, spewing hundreds of tiny new pieces into the atmosphere. In early March, the three astronauts aboard the space station got up in the middle of the night to go hide in the escape capsule because a broken metal piece of a space wrench was on course to either slam into the space station, puncturing it and letting all the air out, or just missing it. It missed.

And now we come to last Sunday. At 9 p.m., Chris and I had just finished dinner at our house on Three Mile Harbor Road and were sitting around in the living room talking about our plans for next weekend. Our dog, a 50-pound Wheaton, was lying on the floor. It was dark out and drizzling.

Our house overlooks the harbor. Even in the dark it is a magnificent view out our living room sliders, about a mile across the way to Northwest, and about two miles in either direction up and down the harbor.

The drizzle was nothing special. There was no indication of thunder or lightning. But then, right over the harbor, there was a burst of light so bright that it lit the entire harbor as if it were day. About three seconds later, it was followed by a low rumble, and then a tremendous noise not unlike a very loud thunderclap you might hear when a bolt of lightning strikes something very nearby.

The dog leaped up and ran behind a club chair. The conversation stopped. And that was that.

"I don't think that was lightning," Chris said.

"I don't know what else it could have been," I said.

We didn't know what else to say about it. We were okay. I briefly thought to call the police to report this, but then thought better of it. They surely have more important things to do. And I had little doubt that everybody around the harbor heard this, and that there would be reports about it.

There were. The calls came in not only to the East Hampton police, but also to police in practically every other town in the county. Calls came in from Sag Harbor, Amagansett, Westhampton, Hampton Bays. Calls to other police departments also came in every other county, city and town between Boston and Virginia Beach, Virginia. A pilot for Delta Airlines saw what he thought were pieces of a meteorite streaking fire across Connecticut heading south. Another pilot, this one for US Air, saw the same thing as he came in toward La Guardia over Long Island Sound.

It was space junk. Specifically it was the second stage of a powerful Soyuz rocket that had lifted off from the Biakonur Cosmodrome in Kazakstan on Saturday afternoon. Aboard were millionaire space tourist Charles Simonyi, of Houston, and three Russian cosmonauts headed up into the stratosphere and out into space aboard a space capsule nestled in the nose cone of the Soyuz. They would arrive in 10 hours at the International Space Station that's been orbiting the earth for the last 15 years, get themselves held fast, and then disembark to replace the two American astronauts and one Russian cosmonaut, who have been up there two months and were the very crew that had to scuttle into the escape pod one month ago. Simonyi would be staying only a few days. He was really just in the way up there, although his $30 million did buy him his ticket, and soon he would depart with the earlier crew for the flight back to earth.

What may have exploded into little bits just above our house on Three Mile Harbor was a piece of the second stage rocket that had taken these men up there.

Unlike the earlier two incidents this year, this one had gone off as planned. The first stage rocket had fallen away 15 seconds after launch, and the second stage rocket had fallen away a few hours after that. Both of these stages, each bigger than a bus, circled the earth 17 times in the next 22 hours, and then began drifting down into the atmosphere, where they would presumably burn up. But the second stage came down faster, and began to burn and throw off the flames which, apparently, is what the two pilots saw, and then, when it got low enough and the friction high enough, break apart into smaller pieces, one of which, the size of a suitcase, exploded over our house.

The next morning, we searched the property looking for anything that size or pieces of something that size. No luggage tags or bathing suits or toiletries were found, however, even charred black, which is what we were told they would probably be.

Are they in the Harbor? It would be up to the East Hampton Town Marine Patrol to search the harbor bottom, I suppose. Or maybe the Navy Seals or some CIA agents. But nobody has showed up yet. Just for your information, my house was hit by a tornado back in 1994. I know you think this is preposterous, and I did too at that time, until it happened. You could look it up. It hit my house on Three Mile Harbor Road late at night, lopping off the top of our chimney and making off with an elaborate children's tree house we'd built in a maple in our backyard. No trace of either was ever found. The tornado also peeled off the entire southern half of the metal roof of Three Mile Harbor Marina. It then took off, but came down again nine miles away, in Bridgehampton. It clobbered the indoor/outdoor furniture annex of Thayer's Hardware Store - you can go in and ask Roger Thayer about it, because he was in town at the time - and then it ripped up trees going right up Main Street to head for the Dan's Papers building. About 50 yards before it got there, though, it lifted off never to be seen again. And that was that.

As for last Sunday's Second Stage rocket, there are some who say that because the Russians have officially denied that their Second Stage came down here, this incident must have been caused by some sort of meteor, or pieces of a meteor, which are for some reason called bolides. Something like that came down to smash a parked car in Nashua, New Hampshire in 1995. There's a record of that.

But if NASA can track space junk the size of screw drivers, which is what they reported to the astronauts that sent them scurrying into the escape hatch a month ago, they surely would have been able to track a bolide the size of a suitcase. But they have no report of anything like that.

From what I have been told, there are now millions and millions of pieces of junk circling the earth every day. It looks like a junkyard up there. And unless somebody goes up there leading a team of Cub Scouts armed with sharp sticks and plastic garbage bags, it's only going to get worse.

As we have learned here on Earth, there is no such thing as throwing something "away" anymore. You have to recycle everything, or burn everything. Why anybody would think it would be different in our atmosphere beats me.

Good news? Well, space aliens will be deterred. Who the hell wants to try to get through all that junk. What? To bang up this very expensive intergalactic flying saucer? And for what? To land down there and meet the idiots who did that?