The Skylab littering fine
NASA loses control of Skylab on re-entry; debris peppers Western Australia. The shire of Esperance, in the polite tradition, issues NASA a $400 littering ticket — finally settled, decades later, by an American radio host.
A working catalogue entry, kept current. Each paragraph is drawn from the publicly documented record.
NASA loses control of the 77-tonne Skylab space station as solar activity inflates the upper atmosphere ahead of schedule. On 11 July 1979, debris from the controlled-but-imprecise re-entry scatters across the Indian Ocean and the sparsely-populated Western Australian outback.
The Shire of Esperance issues NASA a tongue-in-cheek $400 littering fine. The fine is finally paid in 2009 when an American radio host crowd-funds the settlement. The episode is comic — but it establishes a serious legal point that resurfaces every time large hardware re-enters: the country underneath has an opinion about it.
Each entry is publicly documented. Have a correction or a stronger source? Send it to the editorial team via the contact form.
