Have You Seen My Tool Bag?
Tuesday, August 4th, 2009
My wife, like astronaut Heide Stefanyshyn-Piper, is a busy woman — and a Ukrainian-American. Last November, during a spacewalk, a tool bag got loose and got away. My wife loses her car keys about once a week, but we seem to find them just fine.
That tool box? Amateur astronomers were tracking it, and Universe Today predicted it would drop into the Pacific Ocean over the weekend, in a fireball no less. Space.com confirmed it:
The $100,000 tool bag plunged toward Earth and burned up as it re-entered the atmosphere, according to the U.S. Air Force’s Joint Space Operations Center tracking it and more than 19,000 other pieces of space junk in orbit today from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.
Here’s how it happened…
If it was a Craftsman Tool Box, it might have survived. In the 70’s, a friend of mine was working on a 1968 Ford Bronco is his driveway (it was a mess; we called it "Skylab"). While the thing was up on cinder blocks, it crashed while he was under it. It fell on the tool box, which saved him from major injury — or worse.
He later sold the Bronco, but he kept the tool box. Still uses it, too.