My mom gave me a book about astronauts when I was a kid.

I think she really hoped I was going to be one.

We drank tang.

But like I've remained pretty firmly earthbound.

Laura Grego is a former astrophysicist, who's now a fellow at the Laboratory for Nuclear Science and Engineering at MIT.

Laura doesn't go into space. What she does is study how humans use and, in some cases, abuse space.

She tries to figure out what sorts of policies will preserve space as a safe place for all earthlings to share.

We called Laura up because right now,

there's some pretty worrisome stuff happening in space. So this week, we saw that the

International Space Station had what is called a conjunction event, meaning it was in danger

of getting hit by space debris, so the astronauts had to go shelter. And as it turns out, that debris was traceable to the breakup of a specific satellite,

which is an old Russian satellite.

As we learned more, we found out that Russia had actually destroyed that satellite on purpose

in a test of a destructive weapon.

The ISS astronauts seem to be fine and are no longer in any danger.

But when I saw this news about Russia shooting down its own defunct surveillance satellite,

it reminded me of a similar, more tragic space story, a fictitious one.

Did you happen to see the movie Gravity with Sandra Bullock and

George Clooney? Because I thought I remember this, I went back and checked, and it is exactly

the same scenario. It's Russian shooting down a spy satellite that breaks up and endangers

astronauts. Right. So that was a dramatization, and there is, of course, you know, some physics

quibbles with it, but that's basically what happens.

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