Originally posted by dcarson:
Reducing to rubble is similar to getting hit with grapeshot instead of a solid cannonball. Only difference is how many pieces you end up in.
Not quite. It's more like using grapeshot or cannonballs against the side of a ship-of-the-line: the grapeshot doesn't penetrate, the cannonball may. The "ship" in this case is the Earth's atmosphere: reduce the big chunks to small pieces and they'll burn up on entry into the atmosphere just like most meteors do -- and satellites, for that matter. It takes a sizeable chunk of whatever to reach the ground, though what makes it all the way down will be considerably smaller than what originally hit the atmosphere.
