Satiric radio commentary for the 90s from the man who drained Lake Michigan and filled it with hot chocolate!!!
STAN FREBERG HERE...

Space Junk Update

Stan Freberg here with a space debris update. NASA is currently tracking over 8000 pieces of man-made junk up there in space. Heads up, everybody! Could it be Chicken Little was right? Be right back. [:60 SPOT BREAK]

Freberg here. It was a close call for my second-favorite country, when the Russian Mars probe just missed Australia not long ago. Everyone there was outraged when it looked like the plutonium-powred craft was coming down on Down Under. It fell harmlessly into the South Pacific, as it turned out. Well, Jacques Cousteau wouldn't say "harmless," feeding all that plutonium to the fish: (In 'Pete Puma' voice) "Hey, let's have a bite of this glowing stuff, Charlie!"

But it reminded me of something even more sobering: in the more than 40 years NASA has been tracking them, more than 16,000 various trash items have been in orbit, and at those speeds, a grain of sand can pit the windshield of a shuttle.

Most of them came down and burned up on re-entry, but NASA currently has its eye on about 8000 items the size of a baseball or larger, like two rocket bodies (one Russian, one U.S.), and a Chinese satellite. The last are expected to come down in the next sixty days, and sincec 70% of the Earth is water, they'll probably miss land; but I'm keeping one eye in the sky like Chicken Little advised.

With this jam up in space, Michael Jordan's movie is appropriately named: "Space Jam" is right!

Stan Freberg here.