Back in 1972, the USSR launched Kosmos 482, a Venus probe.  The craft subsequently malfunctioned, separating into several pieces.  Chunks of it crashed back to Earth within 48 hours, landing in a New Zealand farmer’s yard.  Two pieces touched down near Ashburton and were discovered immediately; a smaller piece was discovered 6 years later near Eiffelton.

According to space law (that sounds rather Flash Gordon, doesn’t it?), crashed satellites belong to the launching country.  In this case, however, the Soviets used the Shaggy defense and said “satellite?  what satellite?  It wasn’t us.”  New Zealand scientists disagreed, noting various manufacturing marks, the limited number of countries welding titanium, and the even more limited number of countries who launch titanium satellites into space that happen to have Cyrillic writing on them.

However, since there was no owner to make a claim, the farmer appealed to the well-known case of Finders v. Weepers, and the satellite parts were his.

The Final Piece

There is still one piece that has been on a highly elliptical orbit since 1972.

Scientist who track such things believe it may finally crash back to earth in mid-May, slamming down onto terra firm at about 150mph (242kph).

The remaining chunk is about 1 meter wide and was designed to land on Venus, so it’s incredibly rugged.  There’s a chance that its heat shield was damaged or is missing, in which case it may burn up in reentry.  If the heat shield is intact, it could very well come down whole.

How Much Destruction?

You might think “big metal object falling from orbit = city destruction” but that’s not the case here.  It’s a relatively small object and it’s moving at only 150mph, which is sort of like a high speed crash.  For comparison, a typical NASCAR car weighs 3,200 lbs (3x the weight here) and travels at 180mph, and they don’t destroy cities when they crash.

That said, you wouldn’t want to try to catch this with your baseball glove.  It’ll make a 2 meter impact crater, a half-meter deep.  That’s what the math says (alright, alright, what AI says).  It may very well bounce, depending on the ground.  If it hits something solid (like a patio), it’ll crack and crater the surface.  Needless to say, if it strikes a human, that person will be instantly killed.

Only one person has been hity by falling space debris.  Wu Jie, 6, in the Shaanxi province of China, was struck in 2000 by part of a Ziyuan-2B spacecraft which had launched 10 days earlier.  Spent booster parts were intended to fall harmlessly in the nearby mountains but shifting winds steered the small aluminum block that hit Wu Jie into a populated village and he suffered a fractured toe.

BTW, there’s also only one recorded incident of a human being hit by a natural meteorite: Ann Hodges, in Sylacauga, Alabama back in 1954.  That 9-pounder left her with a huge wound in her thigh but she survived.  She then had a lengthy legal battle with her landlady over who owned the meteor.

How Much Money?

The satellite debris here is believed to be mostly titanium.  I checked some spot market prices on titanium scrap, and titanium scrap handlers are somewhat hard to find.  Most say “call us to discuss”.  That’s not surprising.  Most scrap metal dealers are working with copper, steel, and other common materials from construction and industrial sources, not somewhat exotic materials like titanium.

One site says the price in India is ₹200 per kg.  That works out about $1 per pound.  Another site gives a lower figure of 35 cents per pound, but notes “This can be misleading to the buyer, because the cost is also affected by the quality and quantity of the Titanium.”  Indeed, they’re talking figures in the ounce range there, not giant blocks.  Other googling suggests the scrap price could be as high as $3-5 per pound for “high grade alloys”.  I’m guessing USSR-era aerospace titanium is probably as high as you can get.

I’m guessing you can negotiate a price at the top of the range because this is top-of-the-line Soviet materials, plus you’ll have a lot of it.  $1 per pound seems the minimum, which is a nice $1,000 payday, and maybe you’ll get more.

Of course, that’s if you scrap it.  You may get more selling it as a piece of Cold War or space history memorabilia. I could see a museum wanting it, or some collector.  PRO TIP: if you do put it on eBay, do not include free shipping.

What Are Your Odds?

If you’re not between 51.7°N and 51.7°S latitude, you’re probably out of luck, as that is the most likely impact zone.

Within that zone, there’s a lot of water, but that zone happens to be less covered by water than the planet in general.  I asked ChatGPT “how much of the earth’s surface is covered by water between 51.7°N and 51.7°S latitude?” and it couldn’t do the calculation.  “While precise figures for this specific latitudinal band are not readily available, it’s reasonable to estimate that around 70% to 75% of the Earth’s water-covered surface lies within these latitudes.”

Lame.

Grok, on the other hand, readily calculated it as approximately 47.7%.  “The fraction of the Earth’s surface within this band can be calculated using the sine of the latitude angles, as the surface area between two latitudes is proportional to the difference in their sines,” or so it claims.  There was a lot of math I glossed by and I’m just reporting its conclusion.

So better than 50-50 that it lands on dry ground. That zone includes all of Africa, all but the top of China, Mongolia, India, nearly all of South America, the USA except Alaska, Mexico and central America, Australia, Japan, big parts of Europe, SE Asia, a little of Canada…lots of opportunities for this to land in your backyard.  If it does, please comment below!

raindog308

Raindog308 is a longtime LowEndTalk community administrator, technical writer, and self-described techno polymath. With deep roots in the *nix world, he has a passion for systems both modern and vintage, ranging from Unix, Perl, Python, and Golang to shell scripting and mainframe-era operating systems like MVS. He’s equally comfortable with relational database systems, having spent years working with Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.

As an avid user of LowEndBox providers, Raindog runs an empire of LEBs, from tiny boxes for VPNs, to mid-sized instances for application hosting, and heavyweight servers for data storage and complex databases. He brings both technical rigor and real-world experience to every piece he writes.

Beyond the command line, Raindog is a lover of German Shepherds, high-quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop RPGs, and hiking in deep, quiet forests.

His goal with every article is to help users, from beginners to seasoned sysadmins, get more value, performance, and enjoyment out of their infrastructure.

You can find him daily in the forums at LowEndTalk under the handle @raindog308.