Heads Up! Will Space Junk Be Falling On Utah?

A giant piece of space junk crashed into an African village south of Nairobi yesterday.

Apparently the object is a metallic ring roughly eight feet (!) in diameter that weighs about 1,100-pounds.

They say preliminary assessments indicate the space debris is a separation ring from a launch vehicle, which typically burns up upon re-entry to Earth's atmosphere, but for whatever reason, didn't so so this time around.

So yesterday, a village in Kenya. Today a town in Southern Utah?

Well, probably not.

Last March, a smaller chunk of space junk crashed through the roof of a house in Florida and in April several sizable fragments of metal from a SpaceX capsule were found on a Canadian farm.

Was Chicken Little right? Is the sly falling?

"There's no reason to believe this is a public danger," said one NASA official.

Indeed, no one has ever died from space debris. At least not yet.

But there have been injuries and property damage. In 1997, Lottie Williams was hit in the shoulder by a piece of space debris in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The piece was about the size of her hand and was believed to have come from a Delta II rocket.

Other instances of property damage have been documented, but the Williams incident is the only reported "space junk injury" on record.

So what are the odds?

Well, once in history implies the odds are pretty steep, although we only started space travel in the past 60 or 70 years, so saying "in history" is stretching it a bit.

Scientists with several space agencies worldwide said even with increased space travel and the advent of "space tourism," the odds of actually being hit by space junk are astronomically low -- like one-in-a-trillion low.

And since there less than nine billion people on the planet, I'd say we're pretty safe.

For now.

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