Skylab Fell on Western Australia in 1979. The Shire’s A$400 Littering Fine on NASA Took 30 Years to Get Paid.

A 169,000-pound space station came apart over the Indian Ocean and Western Australia in July 1979 and dropped pieces of itself across a long stretch of outback.

The local council looked at the mess, opened its book of standard citations, and fined NASA four hundred Australian dollars for littering.

“Not a piece hit buildings or animals or people, nothing,” Merv Andre, a former shire president, told ABC News forty years later. The ticket was real, and it sat unpaid for thirty years.

The station nobody could aim

Skylab was America’s first space station, in NASA’s own history of the program. It launched on May 14, 1973, housed three crews, and was then left empty in orbit after the last crew departed on February 8, 1974.

Orbits decay. By 1979 Skylab was coming down whether anyone was ready or not, and the technology of the day could not steer it to a chosen patch of ocean.

NASA could influence roughly where the breakup happened by changing the station’s attitude, meaning the angle it presented to the thin upper atmosphere. In the final hours controllers commanded the station into a slow tumble at an altitude of 93 miles to shift the entry point. That is a nudge, not aim.

On July 11, 1979 the station broke up on reentry. NASA’s history of the event puts the documented debris footprint at 2,450 miles, and records sonic booms heard in the few outback towns beneath it, Esperance and Balladonia among them.

The citation

The Shire of Esperance is a local council. Its jurisdiction covers a coastal town and a large area of surrounding country.

It issued NASA a fine of A$400 for littering. ABC News, forty years on, described it as a tongue-in-cheek gesture, handed to the NASA team by one of the shire’s rangers.

It partly was a joke. The debris was also on the shire’s ground, and littering is what the shire wrote it up as.

Guinness World Records now lists it as the first fine issued for littering from space, dated July 11, 1979.

NASA did not pay. The citation went into a drawer on one continent and was ignored on another.

What the law said about the wreck

Underneath the joke sits a real liability regime, and it had been tested eighteen months earlier.

The 1972 Convention on International Liability for Damage Caused by Space Objects makes the state that launches an object into space liable for damage that object causes. In the treaty’s published history, one claim has been filed under it.

On January 24, 1978, a Soviet satellite, Kosmos 954, came down over western Canada carrying a nuclear reactor and scattered radioactive material along a 600-kilometre path from Great Slave Lake to Baker Lake. Canada ran a recovery operation and billed the Soviet Union Can$6,041,174.70. The two governments settled on April 2, 1981, and the Soviet side paid Can$3 million.

So a country with a documented cleanup bill had a treaty route to recover about half of it. A shire with a scattering of scorched metal on empty ground had no damage figure worth claiming, and no state to claim it on behalf of.

It had a litter book. It used the litter book.

Thirty years, then a radio show

In 2009, coming up to the thirtieth anniversary of the reentry, a radio host named Scott Barley of Highway Radio, in Barstow, California, heard the story.

He told his morning-show listeners that the United States had an unpaid parking-ticket-sized debt to a town in Australia, and asked them to clear it.

They did. The listeners raised the money and Barley paid the A$400 to the Shire of Esperance on NASA’s behalf in 2009, thirty years after the citation was written. Esperance invited him over and gave him a key to the city.

The other payout from that night

There was a second sum of money attached to the falling station, and it moved much faster.

The San Francisco Examiner had offered ten thousand dollars to the first person to deliver a piece of Skylab to its offices.

A seventeen-year-old from Esperance, Stan Thornton, scooped a few pieces of Skylab off the roof of his family’s home, caught the first flight to San Francisco, and collected the prize.

So the ledger for the night reads like this. Treaty compensation paid: none. Newspaper prize paid: promptly. Litter fine paid: eventually, by strangers on the radio, three decades late.

The recovered debris is on display at the Esperance Museum, which lists it in its Skylab collection.