The First Person to Get Hit by Space Junk

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OhOn this day in 1997, a woman named Lottie Williams was working out in a park near Tulsa, Oklahoma, when she saw a “huge ball of fire” in the sky. A few minutes later, something hit her in the shoulder and bounced onto the grass. The 5-inch-long object weighed as much as an empty soda can.

Williams was not injured by the mysterious object, which she later learned came from a space rocket, making her the first known person to be hit by man-made space debris. The probability of such an incident occurring is less than one in a trillion.

In 2001, the United States Air Force traced the burned piece of fiberglass to the second stage of a Delta II rocket. This is a section of a rocket that contains the fuel and engines that propel spacecraft through the cosmos.

This component contributed to the launch of an Air Force satellite from California in April 1996, as part of a mission demonstrating methods for monitoring ballistic miles in flight. Eventually, atmospheric drag slowed the decay phase and returned it to Earth.

Read more: “Are we destroying the most isolated place on Earth?

On January 22, 1997, the rocket stage reentered the Earth’s atmosphere some 42 nautical miles above Topeka, Kansas. It spread debris throughout Texas and Oklahoma, including a 551-pound propellant tank that crashed near a farm in Texas. About 30 minutes after breaking through the atmosphere, a piece of the rocket hit Williams’ shoulder.

“I think I was lucky that it didn’t weigh that much,” Williams told NPR in 2011. “I mean, it’s one of the strangest things that’s ever happened to me.”

When the rocket’s second stage reentered Earth’s atmosphere, it appeared to have warmed up to more than 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, the kind of sizzling temperature associated with uncontrolled reentry. During this process, objects tend to move 20 times faster than a bullet.

In the coming years, space junk is expected to multiply as an increasing number of commercial satellite constellations dance around Earth: The amount of such debris could double in less than five decades, according to a 2025 report from the Interagency Space Debris Coordination Committee, which includes more than 10 national space agencies. This growing pile of cosmic dumpsters could threaten future crewed missions and satellites – and therefore our chances of exploring new frontiers beyond our planet.

Fortunately, this is very unlikely to endanger people on the surface of our planet, so stories like Lottie Williams’ will likely remain one in a trillion.

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Main image: Dabarti CGI / Shutterstock

• Molly Glick

  Published on January 22, 2026

  Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.