The First Person to Get Hit by Space Junk

In 1997, Lottie Williams became the first person known to be struck by space debris when a 5-inch piece of burnt fiberglass from a Delta II rocket hit her shoulder while she exercised in a Tulsa park. The debris came from a rocket stage that had launched an Air Force satellite in 1996 before re-entering Earth's atmosphere and scattering wreckage across Texas and Oklahoma. While space junk is expected to double within 50 years, such incidents remain extremely rare with odds less than one in a trillion.