Spacecraft Falling! Get Set to Duck? Anyone remember Skylab?

If you're the kind inclined to worry, here's a real hand-wringer for you: Sometime as early as February, 7,000 lbs. of flaming metal are going to start raining out of the sky, and nobody can say exactly where on Earth it's going to happen. The upside is, there's almost no rational reason you should give it a second thought.

In the 50 years since the launch of Sputnik, the world's first satellite, and Explorer I, America's first satellite, rocket builders from all over the world have fired so much heavy hardware into space that the planet is now surrounded by a belt of litter consisting of some 10,000 objects four inches or more in diameter and many tens of thousands of smaller ones. Taken together, they're estimated to represent more than 900,000 lbs. of flying — and possibly falling — rubbish.
In 2006, wreckage from a plummeting Russian spy satellite whizzed dangerously close to a Latin American Airbus carrying 270 passengers. That near-miss took place over the Pacific Ocean, which is considered among the safest places in the world to bring down satellites due to its unpopulated vastness. The worst uncontrolled reentry in history occurred in July 1979, when Skylab, America's abandoned, 78-ton space station — which had long since run out of maneuvering fuel — came down earlier than planned, raining debris across the Australian outback.