Skylab!

There’s a Chinese rocket hurtling to Earth at 18,000 miles per hour.

It weighs 21 metric ton so the fact that it’s coming down is a tad troublesome.

Brought to mind the old Skylab space station. I was just 14 years old when that was coming down.

I was obsessed with it! 

I recall reading every single newspaper story about it, and while there was little information saying that it might land in North Collins, New York I somehow became convinced that it would.

America was crazed with Skylab news. There were rewards for a piece of it.

I was gonna’ get it!

And here’s the kicker. On the night that it was supposed to re-enter the atmosphere there was a catastrophic event on the edge of town.

A fire at the chicken farm.

My brother John was my roommate at the time. He woke me up at two in the morning.

“Look!”

I went to the window.

I’d never seen such a blaze. We had a fireman’s scanner as my Dad was a volunteer fireman.

“You know what that is?” I asked John as we sat head-to-head staring out at the raging fire.

“A fire?”

“It’s Skylab!” I announced.

“Let’s see what they’re saying on the scanner,” John said.

The announcer came out of the little box.

“It’s Skylab!” The guy said.

John’s eyes got as big as saucers. 

“We gotta’ go get a piece!”

The excitement lasted through the night. I hardly slept. At breakfast I announced to Dad that Skylab had landed two towns over.

He laughed.

“The chicken farm burned down.”

Thing is, there are three scenarios where the Chinese rocket is destined to land in water.

One scenario has it possibly landing in southwest United States or Mexico or Central America.

Much as I did as a 14-year-old I read all I could about it.

Unfortunately, I learned a whole lot about all the satellites that are kind of floating around - uncontrolled - through space.

There isn’t really much of a plan to stop it from re-entering and then plummeting to a town near you.

And that’s the thing about all of this.

We may never know when things get out of kilter. We may all just be sitting around one day and:

💥 💥 💥 💥 

Boom!

It all goes up in flames…

…like the chicken farm! 🐔 

(Happy Mother’s Day! 

To all you Mothers!

I’ve known some great mothers…

…no doubt about it.)