Earth flybys of a rogue asteroid…falling spysats. I’m opening a discount store on used hard hats.

There’s a feeding trough of news circulating about this errant U.S. spy satellite. My email is full of tidbits. Let me share with you a couple of things.

Seems like a consensus that we’re talking about USA-193 that went south. Ground controllers are unable to control the spacecraft. Of course, that’s a story too - why exactly it went nuts. A space debris hit? Bad spacecraft engineering by a contractor?

USA-193, if that’s the one, took off from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California in December 2006 on a Delta 7920 rocket and on assignment from the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). But according to one secret satellite sleuth, the maximum payload for that kind of rocket, from that location, is no more than 10,000 pounds, perhaps even less than that - not the 10 tons that some stories report.

Even so, a five-ton satellite diving into the Earth’s atmosphere might well lead to debris making it down to home planet.

By the way, this “it’ll burn up” in the Earth’s atmosphere is suspect in my mind.

For one, spacecraft entering the Earth’s atmosphere leave a trail of chemistry of foreign substances in the process, from the top layer of the atmosphere down. I hope somebody out there is thinking about the environmental impact — not just from this wayward satellite — but also the daily dose of human-made detritus that assaults the upper layers of our biosphere on a daily basis.

That said, there’s also a need to be pushing for the release of orbital and spacecraft data particular to this satellite’s fall from grace so that independent analysts can access the potential risk and allow those who might be affected to take the necessary mitigating actions.

My buddies over at the Aerospace Corporation’s Center for Orbital and Reentry Studies advise me that some debris from reentering objects do survive the plunge and can strike the Earth. Certain materials, those with high melting points — such as stainless steel, titanium and glass — are more likely to survive reentry than are materials with low melting points.

Also, for orbit decay reentries, those unplanned and unmanaged, the exact reentry points and location of debris impact on Earth are unpredictable. But experience shows that the discovery of reentered objects is rare because most land in water…and water covers nearly three-fourths of Earth’s surface, or in uninhabited areas.

The Aerospace Corporation experts in this arena point out that nobody has ever been injured by space debris to date. Unless, of course, somebody has been pelted to death in some out-of-the-way remote spot, out of communication. There’s been only one reported case of a person “struck” by debris. This individual, a woman in Oklahoma, was brushed on the shoulder by a lightweight fragment of debris in 1997.

To date, there has been only one instance of hazardous materials surviving reentry and being encountered here on terra firma. In 1978, debris from the former Soviet Union’s Cosmos 954 fell into Canada. Some of the debris was radioactive and was cleaned up after the mishap. No injuries were reported, although Canada issued the Soviet Union a littering ticket.

Meanwhile, for now, heads up!

Those of us who sail catamarans tend to hold a prejudicial belief that “two hulls (like two heads) are better than one”. Apparently, Burt Rutan and the Scaled Composites team think so as well.

But when Space Ship Two / White Knight Two made its debut appearance this week, there was something even more enticing about it. Like the wind driving Humanity’s future in space was about to shift. We began to see how the rest of us might tack our way into the black sky for more than just 6 or 7 minutes of floating fun.

And, for some of my aeronautically knowledgeable friends, it was deja vu all over again. Like: “where have we seen this before?” It was downright ghostly:

Take a look at this design – circa 1979 or so – from the Russian Myasishchev Design Bureau as modeled by aerospace scholar Alex Panchenko:

It’s an extreme makeover of the Russian Air Force’s 3M bomber (aka the “Bison”) which had been in service since 1955. [Anyone who knows more about this, please reply with comments: below.] The plan was to drop a rocket-boosted vehicle, “X-15 style”, in the upper atmosphere - at subsonic but significant velocity - which would then light its candle and transit out of the atmosphere. In other words, a Virgin Galactic lift ticket.

Here’s another amazing Panchenko model-photo of the Bison space-launcher beast. It was called the 3M-2 concept. Bison bombers were made-over pretty often in that period. One of them even got puffed up (Super-Guppy style) to carry large parts for the Soviet Buran space shuttle and its Energia booster.

Apparently, the 3M-2 was to have had multiple permutations for various roles: It would have made a dandy crew delivery vehicle. Yes, also a handy satellite killer. And ambitious commanders, no doubt, dreamed of delivering squads of elite Soviet troops anywhere on Earth in a couple of hours (even as our USMC’s SUSTAIN program concept seeks to do in the coming years).

Alex Panchenko’s photos are postcards from the future as well as the past. Please remember, the first word in Scaled Composites is “scaled”. The rampant speculation, of course, is that Rutan has sold Sir Richard’s team on the idea that Scaled’s Level Two design will easily and inexpensively scale to an orbital Level Three configuration.

No surprise: that’s precisely the mission for which the Myasishchev group was designing the 3M-2 back in the late 1970s / early 1980’s.

Composer Igor Stravinsky (stealing from artist Pablo Picasso) supposedly once said: “the merely good composer borrows; the great composer steals!” Aerodynamic artist Burt Rutan would likely agree. His Space Ship Three / White Knight Three design, in Virgin livery colors, may just steal the entire orbital people-mover market by dropping the price to levels mere mortals can maybe afford.

So perhaps we’ll be sailing - sooner rather than later - into the space industrial revolution on twin keels.

“Ready about!?”

There’s discussion regarding creation of a Mexican Space Agency - or AEXA, for short. The Mexican Senate must first deliberate on the matter, before such an organization obtains legal status.

The bill for the creation of AEXA would incorporate Mexico within the international space community. Mexican Space Agency goals are several, but would include selecting technological alternatives for solving specific issues in that country. Also, information and technology obtained in all space science fields and other related arenas would be better coordinated.

Furthermore, AEXA would raise awareness regarding space matters that boost national economy, education, culture and community life in general.

The Mexican Space Agency would also work with Mexican firms to bolster the country’s competence in a host of areas, from meteorology, telecommunications, disaster prevention, and remote sensing to space robotics and exobiology.