So this is not such a big deal. A few months ago, driving across the desert, I stopped to add a rock to the pile to befriend the desert gods in hopes of living to cross the pass again, when on the western horizon I saw a large bright light, coming almost straight towards me. It was breaking up into smoky trailers, and passed almost overhead, within a mile, at an altitude of only about one mile. The main piece proceeded eastward and out of sight. It was only visible to me across about thirty miles because of mountain ranges, and dropped from about thirty thousand feet to only about ten thousand feet above sea level. The ranges were ten thousand feet or more, and I was more than a mile above sea level myself. At that rate, it should have hit somewhere near Topaz, but I think it burned up completely.
Lots of Magnesium/Aluminum/Titanium and a little Beryllium in most space junk. All these burn rapidly at high temps, giving intense white light.... oh the Be might give it a bit of green. A few items might be stainless steel, like the space port-a-potties and water reclamation filter housing.....
I heard on the radio from San Diego that something like that crossed their skies almost the same time. Probably some North Korean trawler fired off some missles at Washington and we lased them before they crossed the coast and set them on fire, and deflected their trajectories.....
Awesome.
Even when something that size comes within a mile of you, your cross section and the cross section of say a fifty meter TiAlVMnMgBe "barn" still leaves you about one chance in ten thousand of actually being hit. What I saw broke up into at least six pieces, and five of them burned up completely within my view.
Titanium is one of the most durable metals lots of resistance to corrosion and one of the most heat-stable as well, but it burns like anything else even Platinum at a high enough temp.... meteors that we find are compact solid balls not shells containing very large spaces inside. The shape of a space station says everything will burn except some dense compact equipment or motors.
3/4 it hits the sea, and 1/10,000 it hits anything human or man-made.
