Give Me Space

By James Lileks

Sunday, March 15, 2026

 

A1,300 lb. satellite fell to Earth this past week, and unless you’re on the phone right now with the insurance company and the roofers, you probably didn’t notice. The chances of anyone getting brained by a piece of debris was small, the authorities insisted, “just 1 in 4,200.”

 

Hmm.

 

If those were million-dollar lottery odds, you’d buy a ticket. But as of this writing, there are no reports of anyone getting their hair mussed or suffering a windshield ding. Stuff falls from space all the time.

 

At least the falling satellite doesn’t reinforce an ongoing narrative of national decline. Such an event was once a sign of American malaise. Remember Skylab? NASA sent it aloft in 1973, a “space station” that provided an utterly unsatisfying coda to moon shots. Instead of heading back to the Moon and building a base so we could raise the flag and laugh at the Russkies, we put up a big bus where astronauts did Science Things. It did not fire the public imagination. Americans did not tune in nightly to see if Skylab experiments had proven that mold could grow in zero Gs. The orbit decayed, and Skylab came down in 1979. It felt like another sign of the American slump. The nation that sent men to the Moon to drive around in a car and hit a golf ball couldn’t keep Skylab from tumbling out the heavens. To make matters worse, it inspired a disco song: “Skylab Is Falling.” A long way from “Fly Me to the Moon.”

 

It got better. We got better. The Shuttle brought back pride and a sense of American panache, although the Challenger disaster made every subsequent launch something of a nail-biter. Now, we have cool Musk vessels landing on platforms like 1950s needle-nose sci-fi movie rockets, or caught by gantry toothpicks. That’s the dominant image of American space know-how, and when combined with the technological dominance displayed in the 2026 Iran War — including lasers, just like Star Wars — you wouldn’t be surprised if China’s massing of ships and troops to take Taiwan occasioned the appearance of a fully operational Death Star with its sights trained on the Three Gorges Dam.

 

All of this, unfortunately, puts NASA in the shade. The upcoming Artemis II Moon voyage, which 97 percent of the population probably doesn’t know about, will reinforce our new commitment to Moon exploration, but you have the suspicion that Musk will be signing contracts with Buc-ee’s for a Moon base store before NASA gets Artemis up and out. It doesn’t help that Artemis has O-ring problems, like the Shuttle; it’s like the White Star Line in 1922 saying its vessels are unsinkable “unless they scrape a ’berg at night, but what are the chances of that?”

 

The satellite that fell this week was the Van Allen Probe A, designed to study the Van Allen belts. Its sibling, the Van Allen Probe B (designed to study the Van Allen suspenders, presumably), is still up there, and it’ll soon have more company: “The Federal Communications Commission approved the launch of thousands more Amazon satellites last month,” The Independent reports, “and SpaceX hopes to launch up to a million more Starlink satellites to serve as orbiting data centers.” Advocates for a less cluttered sky are opposed, since they insist that teeming heavens block telescope observation. Valid point — but no doubt the view will be better from Mars. Best get cracking on that, then. Can we do it? It isn’t 1979. Yes, we can.

 

The other day, the New York Times had a story about the possibility of rocks from Mars having seeded Earth with life, an old theory that’s making the rounds again. It’s not as if a boulder dropped, cracked open, and Adam stepped out, blinking and confused, but perhaps Martian microbes hitched a ride on a meteor, and Martian life ended up colonizing Earth. Time, perhaps, to return the favor.