‘If we get caught between the moon and New York City’

“Look, the fame rocket is only on the upward trajectory for a limited time.”

—Guy Fieri

By Alex P. Vidal

IF we “get caught between the moon and New York City,” Christopher Cross said in Arthur’s Theme, his 1981 hit song, “the best that we can do is fall in love.”

How could we fall—or even think of falling—in love if our lives were in danger?

Most of us here in the Empire State were probably sleeping May 11 (Monday) night when we “nearly got caught” by the falling fragments of a Chinese rocket that fell from the sky.

The junk, reportedly weighing up to several hundred pounds, ”narrowly missed New York City”, largely burning up in the atmosphere before some of the debris survived long enough to slam into West Africa.

The incident reminded me of the Skylab, which fell in pieces in the small town of Esperance, Australia, a remote spot seven-and-a-half hours away from Perth by car in 1979.

Before Skylab fell, panic gripped the Philippines when naysayers claimed the country with 7,100 islands was among those in the danger zone being closely watched along with Australia, Indonesia, and Singapore.

I was baby-sitting my twin half-brothers when I heard reports in the radio so many Filipinos suffered heart attack because of anxiety and fear.

A tailor, who could not accept that “we might all be killed together once the Skylab fell” in front of our house in Iloilo City, lost his mind and died days later.

Children in our surroundings would chant a prank, “Ngaa napatay si Manny (Why did Manny die?)”

Someone would shout, “Skaaaaylaaaab.”

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Skylab eventually reached Earth in the early morning hours of July 12, 1979, falling in pieces in Esperance, Australia. 

Esperance resident Stan Thornton was able to snatch up a few of the pieces. He flew to San Francisco to collect a $10,000 prize offered by the San Francisco Examiner to the first person to bring in a piece of the lab.

The fragments that nearly hit the Big Apple came from China’s new single-stage Long March 5B rocket it test-launched, propelling its cargo into orbit before the 20-ton core eventually fell back into the atmosphere, according to a technology publication, Ars Technica.

Quoting  astronomer Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Fox News reported that it’s unlikely that anywhere near that large of an object is what returned to Earth--but fragments weighing up to several hundred pounds could have survived re-entering the atmosphere.

The U.S. Space Force’s 18th Space Control Squadron, which detects, tracks and identifies all manmade objects in orbit, confirmed the re-entry over the Atlantic Ocean at 8:33 p.m. May 11.

The doomed core passed right over New York City, Ars reported -- and if re-entry had been just a few minutes earlier, debris could reportedly have showered the Big Apple.

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Scary especially that most of us have been stranded at home in a lockdown for more than two months already owing to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Had the debris fell in New York City’s residential areas, no one knows how horrific would be damage to be inflicted to the people and their properties.

Some of those who survived the coronavirus infection would have been killed by the rocket fragments.

There are reportedly about 8,000 man-made objects the size of baseballs and larger orbiting earth. 

About seven percent are working satellites, 15 percent are rockets, and the rest is fragments and defunct satellites. 

Atlantis reported that “though 8,000 may seem like a lot, USSPACECOM, the military body responsible for tracking the debris, says that it amounts to only three or four pieces per area the size of the airspace over the continental United States up to 30,000 feet.”

No humans have ever been killed by falling space debris on record.

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Here’s the latest coronavirus statistics in New York as of May 14, 2020: cases: 350,848; deaths: 27,290; and recovered: 59,217.

Governor Andrew Cuomo’s emergency orders are set to expire on Friday, May 15, and he has focused on taking steps toward restarting New York’s battered and shuttered economy, including getting some residents back to work.

(The author, who is now based in New York City, used to be the editor of two local dailies in Iloilo)