[alduin32]

It's an interesting event, but this article is a bit misleading, and the title outright wrong : the object did not reach space in any meaningful way, and Robert Brownlee never said that it did. In fact, since meteors with a similar weight coming in at a third of the lower bound of the manhole's velocity can not reach the surface, we can assume that the manhole burned up in the atmosphere pretty quickly.

From https://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Tests/Brownlee.html :

> As usual, the facts never can catch up with the legend, so I am occasionally credited with launching a "man-hole cover" into space, and I am also vilified for being so stupid as not to understand masses and aerodynamics, etc, etc, and border on being a criminal for making such a claim.

[m463]

Never let the facts get in the way of a good story...

But in this case the brownlee facts about the story make a good story.