I think that there is much discussion that could be had on this topic.
I'm not a physicist, astronomer or rocket scientist...but this subject as both intrigued and concerned me for years.
Aren't "falling stars" after all, just asteroids and comets on near misses of Earth?
Falling stars are meteors, usually not much larger than a grain of sand. They enter Earth's atmosphere at several miles per second and burn up.
It's always amazed me that we could even see something as small as that burning up when it's so darned far away from us (what, five, ten or even twenty miles over our heads?). So, they miss Earth in the sense that they do not make it to the ground, but they definitely hit Earth's upper atmosphere (and that's no miss in my book!).
Astronomers don't call them asteroids or comets, reserving those designations for larger stuff.
BTW, I'm not an astronomer/physicist either, just a guy who's had a couple of astronomy courses. :-)