鈥淲hat goes up, must come down.鈥� 

That鈥檚 pretty much the way gravity works and it鈥檚 a great song by the band 鈥淭he Alan Parsons Project鈥�. Then there's the story of Chicken Little. He gets hit on the head by a falling acorn and thinks it was the sky falling. So he runs around trying to warn everyone else that, 鈥淭he sky is falling! The sky is falling!鈥�.

On May 10, a spacecraft made a re-entry into the earth鈥檚 atmosphere and the news said it landed in the Indian Ocean causing no damage or harm. Hmm ... the story is a little more complicated than that.

The spacecraft was originally built by the Soviet Union and it was called 鈥� Kosmos-482鈥�. It was supposed to go to Venus where it would probe the planet, but something went horribly wrong during its launch, and it ended up orbiting the earth for over 50 years.

The news just dismisses the story with no harm done. Did anyone ask the fish or the ocean how they felt about the whole event? Another piece of space junk has become a piece of ocean junk. That doesn鈥檛 sound completely harmless to me. Junk is junk and if it had landed on someone, that would not have been good news.

Interesting enough, Yellowknife has its own tale of a falling Russian satellite. Around midnight on Jan. 24, 1978, another satellite called Kosmos 954 was a fiery shooting star which shot across the sky as it passed by. A couple of people saw it. Now to make things even more dramatic, the craft had an onboard nuclear reactor. So as it burnt up, it scattered some radioactive debris across 黑料吃瓜网 Canada. Think about it.

This was big news. I was in Yellowknife at the time and was listed in the phone book as a person involved in mineral exploration. I got a few phone calls from some news company down south. They wanted information and they wanted to know if they could hire me or someone to take them to the crash site. I explained to them that no crash site had been found yet. Also, it was the middle of winter, and we didn鈥檛 have a whole lot of daylight, but we did have a lot of snow. So even if you went out in a plane or helicopter, there might not be much to see. They decided to wait until some sort of crash site was found or at least a piece of debris.

The government sent people up to look for debris or a crash site and they flew the spacecraft鈥檚 flight path and ran a radiometric survey to see if there was much radiation left by debris.

They even had some ground searchers dressed up in radiation suits just in case. Eventually some debris was found in the Thelon Game Preserve but since no one was injured, the press lost interest in the story.

The effort to clean up the radioactive material became known at Operation Morning Light. The federal government ended up billing the Soviet regime $6 million for compensation; they ended up paying out $3 million.

In 1957, the first satellite was launched and it was called Sputnik One. It circled the planet and sent out radio waves in the form of beeps. I can remember people going out at night to see this marvel of technology. 

So I looked up how many satellites are circling the planet now. In 2024, they reckon there were 25,000 of them up there and more get added every few days. There are also 34,000 pieces of space junk bigger than 10 cm circling around us.

I assume that these satellites do influence the planet. When do we reach a saturation point and say 'Okay, no more'? It is also interesting that wherever humans go they tend to leave a lot of litter behind. The upper atmosphere is getting crowded and at some point, overcrowding is going to lead to problems, with or without nuclear power. 

Remember 鈥渨hat goes up, must come down."