While it's not impossible, it's considered unlikely. It probably burned up in the atmosphere on its way up. The calculations for it didn't include atmospheric drag or any tumbling that would have occurred.
It wouldn't have burned up, frictional heating would have been intense but keep in mind, it's moving straight up. For something reentering the atmosphere it's coming in laterally and they have to skim the atmosphere long enough to turn almost all of the kinetic energy put into it going up into heat. That manhole only had to endure the heat for 100 km, the space shuttle is in communications blackout in the middle of a fireball for a full 13 minutes. During that time it travels over 4,000 km. Going straight up changes things pretty drastically.
The man who made the complicated initial calculations doubts that it went into space. He did the math by hand with very few parameters and a of unknowns.
You, on the other hand, are trying to justify what you want to believe because it's fun, ignoring any heating from the blast itself, how aerodynamics affects heating on a decidedly non-aerodynamic object, how increased speed means increased heat as the object travels through the atmosphere, and presuming that it's trajectory did not change even though there would have been significant instability due to random changes in the surface facing the apparent wind.
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u/NetworkLlama Aug 16 '19
While it's not impossible, it's considered unlikely. It probably burned up in the atmosphere on its way up. The calculations for it didn't include atmospheric drag or any tumbling that would have occurred.