In January 1978, the Soviet reconnaissance satellite Kosmos 954 tumbles out of orbit and breaks apart over the Northwest Territories, scattering radioactive debris across a remote stretch of Canadian wilderness. The film follows the scramble that follows: Canadian and American teams racing to locate and recover fragments of the satellite's nuclear power source before contamination spreads or the story becomes an international incident. Investigators comb frozen lakes and forest with geiger counters, working against weather and terrain as much as against the clock, while officials in Ottawa and Washington weigh how much to tell the public about a nuclear-powered spacecraft raining down on their territory. Interviews and archival material lay out how a Cold War surveillance tool built to track American submarines became a genuine environmental hazard, and how a joint search-and-recovery operation turned a diplomatic embarrassment into a case study in nuclear cleanup. The film treats the search itself as the story: what they found, what they never recovered, and what it revealed about the risks of powering satellites with reactors.