If the Stars should Appear One Night

Hundreds of miles above the blinking navigation lights of a Southwest Airlines 737 en route to Chicago’s Midway Airport, other sky travelers of sorts navigate the dark space in between the passing jet airliner and the myriad constellations far above that blanket the night.
 
When we first moved here, on any given cloudless night I would see three or four passing satellites traversing overhead. Sometimes a brighter flare would dance off their mirror-like solar panels. The Sun’s rays, reflected downwards from 483 miles above the Earth, appeared from my angle of view as a brief burst of light before dimming seconds later. “Iridium flares” they were sometimes called. So named after a class of first-generation satellites with prominent solar panels, all now deorbited and gone from the night sky.
 
Every three weeks or so I would catch a glimpse of the International Space Station, one of the brighter objects orbiting above, whose magnitude of light is only outshone by the Moon. Fascinating in that it meant fellow humans were up there, passing overhead at 5 miles per second.
 
But for the most part, most of the dots of light in visible motion would simply be space junk - discarded booster rockets or now-derelict hardware that once served a purpose to some government or private corporation - that now orbit methodically yet purposeless in near-endless rotations around their home planet.
 
Inevitably, all of these objects will lose their fight against gravity and will tumble downward, either to burn up in our atmosphere or to meet their fate in the satellite graveyard called Point Nemo, a watery cemetery 1,670 miles from any land, far out in the Pacific Ocean. Since the 1970s, around 300 retired orbital craft, modular stations and satellites have ended their days there in that spacecraft graveyard.
 
It’s a region of ocean low in biomass, so harm to living things is minimized. But it doesn’t mean all that falling space junk is harmless. Particles of aluminum and other metals now found in the atmosphere – which scientists have determined did not come from meteorites or from Earth, but from reentering space hardware – show that humans can pollute just about anything we touch.
 
In recent years, the amounts of human-made objects circling the Earth have grown exponentially. Now, on most clear nights, I will see a dozen or more satellites silently cruising overhead. And that’s without trying.
 
Still, this influx of human-made orbital litter doesn’t prevent me from looking skyward on any given evening after barn chores are finished. The stars and planets still outnumber our own weak attempts at joining the pantheon of night’s celestial majesty. So as Loretta and Annabelle peacefully graze in the northwest pasture, I’ll stand with them out there in the darkness, my head angled back, and just look up.
 
I try to memorize their names - the countless stellar objects named after long-dead gods and mythical figures - and I can remember quite a few. But for the most part, I tend to forget the vast majority, being bad at names in general and especially poor at recalling words of Middle Eastern origin, since Persians had naming rights due to the fact they were the original astronomers, charting the night sky while Europeans were too busy fighting wars, arguing about religion and dying of plague to figure out that they weren’t the center of the universe.
 
Every once and a while I’m rewarded with a special treat. My favorite are fireballs, very bright meteors that, on the three occasions I saw them, were just that. Rotating balls of clearly defined fire, streaking across the sky and leaving a trail of vivid color in their wake, as the outer layers of a comet’s detritus or asteroid fragment are stripped away and then collide with air molecules at high speed, glimmering like pixie dust for a few brief moments before fading away to black.  
 
For the most part, even these spectacular sky objects are decimated in the atmosphere. But every once and a while one makes it to Earth. Each square kilometer of the earth’s surface should collect one meteorite fall about once every 50,000 years, on average. I’ll keep waiting.
 
The trays are in the upright position and the “fasten seat belt” sign is alit. The woman in seat 5F puts away her paperwork and, with the cabin dimly lit, stares absentmindedly at the ground passing below. Her flight will be in Chicago before not too long. But right now, it’s just past Starved Rock as the pilot makes a course adjustment for their approach into Midway Airport as they cruise along at 5,000 feet.
 
Down below the Earth is cloaked in night and the vast swaths of cornfield are as dark as the ocean. Yet here and there are signs of civilization and one in particular briefly catches her eye.
 
It’s a small farm with the house and barn lights on. She wonders for a moment what life must be like down there and pictures herself standing in that place she’s never been before and probably never will actually be. She imagines it’s a farm like so many others, and she fills in the details – the farmhouse, the barn, and all of its animals - with her own garnered from books and distant childhood memories.
 
The jet engines hum and the plane moves steadily onward, as the small dots of light down below disappear beneath the metallic wing. The woman shifts in her seat, thumbs through a magazine, and doesn’t give the farm a second thought.