It's a Pre-Dawn Blast From the Past

What goes up must come down, even 26 years later. And the agedRussian rocket that came down just before dawn yesterday did so witha glowing, protracted brilliance that startled the early birds whosaw it from New York to North Carolina.

Space junk has never looked so good. As the decaying remains ofthe 1975 booster reentered the atmosphere shortly before 6 a.m., ahuge, pulsing white ball streaked across the sky over the Washingtonarea. Behind it flowed a smoke trail thousands of miles long, whichthe rising sun illuminated with spectacular drama.

The event not only lit up the sky. It lit up telephone lines atradio and television stations, at the U.S. Naval Observatory and evenat the U.S. Space Command in Colorado, where throughout the day ArmyMaj. Barry Venable patiently answered calls seeking detail andexplanation.

"If you're a space object and want to be noticed," he joked, "Iguess you need to reenter on the East Coast at rush hour."

The SL3 rocket was launched by the Soviet Union during the ColdWar to carry a spy satellite into orbit. According to Geoff Chesterat the Naval Observatory, the satellite fell out of orbit in 1992,but the booster -- "a big empty gas can" maybe 20 feet long and asmuch as 10 feet wide -- took its own time in returning to Earth.

In Woodbridge, medical photographer Andy Morataya was late forwork and hustling to his car when he looked up and wondered what hewas seeing. The object was extraordinarily bright in the sky, "asbright as the light coming off of a full moon," he said, and itssingle solid light meant it couldn't be an airplane on a runwayapproach.

Morataya grabbed his video camera out of his bag and focused. "AsI began shooting, I began to see little particles falling off of it.. . . It just kept going. It just flew right by."

To the north, Michael Smith, of Annapolis, was heading to meet hismorning running partners. "The astro was arcing the Chesapeake Bay asI was driving the Naval Academy Bridge," he recounted. Its center was"day-glow white" against the slate-colored sky, and its cigar-shapedtrail lingered nearly 20 minutes. Smith was struck by the surrealimage and beauty. "It was the talk of the group."

Space is filled with this kind of leftover hardware and debris. Onany given day, the U.S. Space Command monitors the orbital movementof about 8,300 man-made objects as small as a baseball. But rarely isthe disintegration of such witnessed by so many.

Officially, the command pegged yesterday's rocket reentry at about100 miles off the coast of Delaware. Venable said that little, ifany, of the booster likely survived its blazing descent.

The military had been following the booster closely and predictingits demise for the past week, although trackers only narrowed theirgeographic window to a 6,000-mile zone that reached from the NorthPole to South America. "Reentry assessment is an inexact science,"Venable explained, with solar and climatic variables that can greatlyaffect a final downward trajectory.

The command didn't publicize the coming phenomenon, hencecommuters' and runners' early-morning surprise. But satelliteobservers in the know were clued in. Three days ago, retiredscientist Harro Zimmer began posting his predictions from Berlin onan Internet site, honing the time and location coordinates with"alert updates." He hinted that a sighting in the New York area mightbe possible.

With his latest message yesterday, he confirmed the rocket'sexpansive audience, and though his grammar might have lost a littlein translation, Zimmer's enthusiasm came through.

"Cosmos 756 RB fiery decayed!" he declared.