Ten-year-old Dwight Steven-Boniecki cowered in his bed in Sydney’s Hills District, praying he’d be alive next morning. It was the night of July 11-12, 1979 and the self-confessed “space nut” knew the most expensive piece of space machinery ever launched would crash somewhere between Australia’s east coast and the Indian Ocean.

Skylab – sent heavenward on May 14, 1973 from Florida’s Kennedy Space Centre on a modified version of the Saturn V rocket used for the NASA’s Apollo moon landings – was now just an obsolete piece of “space junk”.