Skylab fell back to Earth, scattering debris over Australia

On July 11, 1979, Skylab — America’s first space station — re-entered Earth’s atmosphere and broke apart in a slow-motion fireball watched by the whole world. At 169,000 pounds, it was the heaviest spacecraft to fall from orbit up to that time, and nobody could say precisely where the pieces would land.

Controllers nudged the dying station into a tumble to aim the debris at the southern Indian Ocean. They mostly succeeded — but the breakup ran late, and surviving chunks showered a sparsely populated stretch of Western Australia near Esperance and Balladonia. No one was hurt.

The local shire famously fined the United States $400 for littering — a bill NASA never officially paid.

Residents collected oxygen tanks, hatch fragments, and twisted metal, some now displayed in the Esperance museum. Skylab’s messy ending helped spur decades of work on controlled re-entry and orbital-debris safety.