As one of America's greatest innovators, Steve Jobs naturally found his way into the pages of Popular Science with great regularity. From the DIY spirit of Apple's early days, to his exile and evolution at Next and Pixar, all the way into the modern iEra, we've covered Steve and his doings for more than three decades.

Generally when it comes time to decommission or de-orbit a satellite, the operator fires a few retro-rockets and the hardware either gets pushed into a parking orbit, or falls safely into the middle of the Pacific. Sometimes though, gravity wants its toys back early. Here are the biggest re-entries so far where operators either lost control, or never had control in the first place.

Radio hats. DIY jetpacks. Even those of us who never experienced a time when you could purchase science projects for $4.95 and telescope lenses for $1.95 can't help feeling a twinge of longing looking at these crowded, black-and-white illustrations. A part of their charm lies in the element of surprise. Nowadays, you can scour a product's reviews online and zoom in on its photos before committing to a purchase. But magazine coupons are risky. Like Calvin, you could wait six weeks for a propeller

In Australia our energy comes from a range of different sources. When it's sunny, our solar panels soak up the rays and convert them into electricity. Weather turning bad? Gale whipping up? Not to worry, that chilling breeze isn't just giving us pneumonia - it's turning the blades of wind turbines across the nation. Just a little too chilly? Maybe the heat from that coal we're burning can keep us warm. And if all else fails, there's always the prospect of nuclear energy in the future.

With the recent crash of NASA's UARS satellite, we thought we'd chronicle the re-entry of space junk over the years. 22,000 pieces of debris are currently being tracked in orbit by NASA, with millions more too small to detect. Hundreds return to Earth, usually undetected, each year. Here are just some of them.

These days, tech gets released faster than most people can keep up with. Plenty of gadgets get left by the wayside, either because they simply failed to attract a large enough userbase from the get-go, or because they really were absolute rubbish. We decided to gather five of our favourite spectacular crashes in gadget land.