NASA’s Space Junk Fine

In 1979, the small Western Australian town of Esperance received a very unusual visitor. It was not a tourist, not a diplomat, and not even a lost backpacker. It was a piece of NASA’s space station.

The space station was Skylab, one of America’s early major space projects. After several years in orbit, it finally began its return to Earth. NASA had hoped most of the debris would fall into the Indian Ocean, which seems like a sensible place to drop something nobody really wants to sign for. But the plan was not perfect. Some of the debris crossed the ocean and landed in southern Western Australia.

For locals, that night was a bit like a free fireworks show, except much louder and slightly more serious. People saw bright streaks across the sky. Some heard sonic booms. Windows and doors rattled. In the days that followed, bits and pieces of metal began turning up on farms, in scrubland, and around the Esperance area. Oxygen tanks, structural fragments and other strange-looking objects were suddenly lying quietly on Australian soil.

NASA staff later came to check whether the debris was radioactive. Locals, meanwhile, had their own work to do. They looked, collected, compared, and tried to work out whether what they had found was a piece of space history or just ordinary scrap metal. The San Francisco Examiner even offered a US$10,000 reward for the first person to deliver a piece of Skylab to the newspaper. A teenager from Esperance actually flew to the United States with a fragment, almost as if he was personally returning something that had fallen out of the sky.

But the most Australian part of the story was still to come.

A ranger from the Shire of Esperance later issued NASA with a fine for littering. The amount was A$400. Strictly speaking, it was more of an official joke than a serious legal pursuit. But it was a very good joke. The message was simple. Even if you are NASA, and even if what you drop is a space station, you still cannot just leave rubbish in our backyard and pretend nothing happened.

NASA did not pay the fine.

So the story became part of local legend. Many years later, on the thirtieth anniversary of Skylab’s fall, a radio host in Barstow, California, named Scott Barley heard that the “space littering fine” had never been settled. He asked his listeners to chip in, raised the money, and finally paid the A$400 on NASA’s behalf.

So the full story goes like this. An American space station fell on Australia. An Australian town issued NASA a littering fine. NASA ignored it. Then an American radio host paid the fine thirty years later. It is a strangely complete little circle, even if it took a while to close.

Esperance made good use of the story. Its museum still holds pieces of Skylab, and the incident has become one of the town’s best-known curiosities. Being hit by a space station does not sound especially lucky. But turning it into a local attraction, and issuing NASA a littering fine along the way, feels very Australian.

Sometimes what falls from the sky is not a gift. Sometimes it is an American space station. And if it lands in Australia, it may still come with a fine.