A blazing space race that could bring the sky down on our heads
Premium
Read Full Story
In the immortal series of Asterix comics written by Goscinny and Uderzo, the indomitable Gauls had only one fear: that the sky would fall on their heads. In a world preoccupied by covid, even as we sought the ‘magic potion’ of the vaccine, that fear returned as a 23-tonne booster of China’s Long March satellite threatened to crash back to Earth. That it harmlessly did so in the Indian Ocean did not allay the fear of it happening again. In fact, it was the fourth big uncontrolled re-entry in history. The biggest was the Soviet Skylab in 1979, and I have memories of us as school children eagerly following its descent and plotting it on graph papers.