First person hit by space junk

The first person known to have been struck by orbital debris returning to Earth was Lottie Williams (USA). On the morning of 22 January 1997, Williams was walking laps in a park in Turley – a suburb of Tulsa, Oklahoma, USA – when she was stuck a glancing blow on the shoulder by a 5-inch-long (12.7-cm) piece of blackened fibreglass. The fragment was later confirmed to have been part of the second stage of a US-made Delta II rocket.

According to accounts she gave to the press a few years after the event, Williams was walking laps of the park with a few friends when her eye was caught by a bright flash in the sky, a shooting star that flared and faded as it streaked away towards the south. A few minutes later, something bounced off her shoulder and skittered off into the grass. Williams was totally unhurt by the object, which she described as weighing about as much as an empty soda can (around 16 grams), but couldn't see where it might have come from.

It turned out that the shooting star Williams saw was an Aerojet AJ10-118K second stage from a Delta II rocket. It had been used to launch an Air Force satellite from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on 24 April 1996, and had been in a decaying orbit since. It re-entered Earth's atmosphere around 42 nautical miles (77 km) above Topeka, Kansas, and scattered debris across Oklahoma and Texas. The largest single piece of debris was a 250-kg (551-lb) propellant tank, which landed only 50 m from a farmhouse near Georgetown, Texas.

Experts from the US Air Force analysed a fragment of the debris in 2001. Though the fragment was too small and badly deformed to positively identified, its composition was consistent with it having been part of the insulator overwrap of the rocket engine's thrust chamber. The state of the material also suggested that it had been heated to at least 1,200°C, which corresponds to the kinds of temperatures recorded during uncontrolled re-entry.