When NASA's 77-tonne Skylab station fell out of orbit in 1979 and scattered debris across Western Australia, the Shire of Esperance did the only reasonable thing: it fined the United States $400 for littering.

In July 1979, after debris from the re-entering American space station Skylab came down across a stretch of Western Australia, the Shire of Esperance issued NASA a 400-dollar ticket for littering. The detail that the popular version tends to drop, and the one that makes the story make sense, is that everyone involved knew it was a joke. The ticket was a piece of local humour, issued in good fun, not a serious attempt to bill a superpower.

That does not make it less worth telling. It makes it a better story than the straight-faced version, because the people of Esperance understood exactly what they were doing.

Why Skylab came down where it did

Skylab was the first United States space station, launched in 1973 and home to three crews before it was left empty. It was a large object, its mass at re-entry usually given at around 77 tonnes, and it was never designed for a controlled return to Earth.

By the late 1970s its orbit was decaying faster than expected. Higher than predicted solar activity had increased the drag on the station, and the Space Shuttle, which might have been used to boost or safely dispose of it, was not flying yet. As NASA’s history of the re-entry records, the combination of shuttle delays and rising atmospheric drag left no way to save the station. Re-entry became unavoidable, and the question shifted from whether Skylab would fall to where.

That question could not be answered precisely. The descent of a large object through the atmosphere depends on too many variables, atmospheric drag, the tumbling of the object, solar conditions, for any exact prediction. NASA aimed the re-entry to drop debris into the Indian Ocean. The station broke up later than the model assumed, and as the museum holding one recovered fragment describes, the debris field extended on past the ocean and across land, scattered over a sparsely populated stretch of Western Australia in a swath from the coastal town of Esperance across the Nullarbor Plain and beyond Balladonia.

No damage, and a teenager on a plane

The important fact about the debris is that it hurt no one. It fell across a thinly populated region, caused no injuries and no real damage, and the pieces ranged from small fragments to substantial chunks of the station.

The San Francisco Examiner had offered 10,000 US dollars to the first person to deliver a piece of Skylab to its offices. Stan Thornton, a 17-year-old from Esperance, found fragments on his property, travelled to San Francisco with the debris, and collected the prize. That part of the story is also true, and it sets up the tone of what the Shire of Esperance did next.

The ticket

When NASA representatives came to the area in connection with the debris, the Shire of Esperance presented them with a fine: 400 dollars, for littering, under the local ordinance that would cover anyone else who scattered rubbish across the district.

It was a deliberate piece of comic theatre. A small rural shire could not seriously expect to regulate the re-entry of an American spacecraft, and was not trying to. The joke worked precisely because of the mismatch, a local council applying an ordinary littering rule, the kind used for dumped household waste, to the most technologically advanced country on Earth and its fallen space station. NASA did not pay the ticket, but that was part of the joke rather than a diplomatic incident.

The fine then sat unpaid for thirty years, less as a grievance than as a piece of local folklore that Esperance was happy to keep alive. As Guinness World Records notes, it was settled in 2009, when an American radio host, Scott Barley of a California station, raised the 400 dollars from his listeners in time for the thirtieth anniversary. The cheque was handed over, and the long-standing joke was given a tidy ending.

Why the story has lasted

The reason the Skylab fine is still retold is partly the neatness of the image, a parking-style ticket issued to a space agency. But it has also kept a certain relevance, and that is worth noting without overstating it.

The underlying problem, large objects coming out of orbit without precise control over where their debris lands, did not end with Skylab. Uncontrolled or partially controlled re-entries of spent rocket stages and defunct satellites still happen, and the same wide margin of uncertainty still applies. The question of who is responsible when debris crosses borders is handled at the level of international treaty rather than local councils. Esperance’s ticket was a joke, and the people who issued it knew it. But the joke worked because it pointed at something real, that a town can find the wreckage of someone else’s spacecraft scattered across its district, through no choice of its own, and be left to tidy it up.