Chinese Satellite Crashes Into House

toggleflipflop writes "In China, a returning satellite crashed into a house. No one was hurt. More details in this article. Apparently inhabited by an eternal optimist: 'The satellite landed in our home. Maybe this means we'll have good luck this year,' the tenant of the wrecked apartment was quoted as saying by the newspaper. According to the People's Daily's article on the subject nothing seems to have gone wrong."

No thanks.

[wankledot]

Someone once told me that being shit on by a bird was good luck to the Italians... I guess this is like that to the nth degree

Personally, I'd rather have bad luck and no bird shit on my head (or satellites in my house)

I don't understand

[elid]

"The returning capsule only went through the roof and no one was injured or died. Experts who inspected the return capsule found it was not damaged at all," the report said, quoting local official Ai Yuqing.

"The landing technology of our country's satellites is very mature and the precision of the landing point is among the best in the world. Members of the public need not worry about this," it also said, quoting Chinese space experts.

Someone please explain this to me. Did they plan on crashing the thing into this guy's roof?

I wonder...

[FiReaNGeL]

I wonder if China is deliberately crashing its satellites on its territory for secrecy reasons... maybe it was a spy satellite or something?

Seriously, given China size, they should have been able to find a decent landing spot... it isn't THAT densely populated is it?

Re:First Image

[Anonymous Coward]

Notice that it took that website 2 days after the "landing" to acknowledge that the thing hit a house. This is the news from 2 days ago from that same site:

Beijing, Oct. 15 (Xinhuanet) -- China has successfully retrieved its 20th recoverable satellite for scientific and technological experiments. The satellite's information capsule returned to earth Friday.

Link here. [xinhuanet.com]

Re:I wonder...

[pe1chl]

About 5 times more densely than the USA, and 15 times more densely than Russia.
Maybe that explains it?

Re:it could get worse...

[Anonymous Coward]

Posted anon to avoid the karma:

"The strange accident of the MiG-23

04 July, 1989.

From the Soviet airbase near Kolobzreg at the seashore of the Baltic Sea in Poland a MiG-23 took off for a training flight. After the take off the pilot, Colonel Skurigin realised that the afterburner of his plane stopped and the power of the engine begun to fall. The altitude at this time was about 130-150 m and the pilot believed that the descending aircraft is unable to fly any longer. Without turning the engine off the pilot ejected and landed safely with his parachute. To the great astonishment of the ground crew the position of the plane fixed and it flew away to the West. The autopilot kept the last direction of the plane. The aircraft was not armed but the ammunition for the 23 mm machine gun was onboard. The phantom plane left the airspace of the former East Germany and violated the West German airspace where it was intercepted and escorted a pair of American F-15s. As the F-15s didn't get permission to fire they let the aircraft flew away. France also alerted its Mirage fighters being in readiness with permission to fire if the phantom plane was dangerous for French built-up areas. Eventually it was unnecessary because after some 900 km the MiG-23 ran out of fuel and crashed in the area of Kortrijk city in Belgium ( NW of Belgium ). A house was ruined due to the crash and a 18 years old young man was buried under the ruins and died."

Not just the chinese

[ssand]

It's not just the chinese Space agency. If you look at nasa, and other space angencies, all have been riddled by some sort of issue, many of them similar, such as the incident with one of the mars rover, the space dust from the sun that failed to deploy its parachutes, or when one of Nasa's ships was unfortunately destroyed upon reentry.

Re:I don't understand

[morcheeba]

That does bring up an interesting question... why did the chinese satellite survive and Genesis was in pieces.

The main reason would that the Chinese parachute worked while the Genesis failed.

The other reason would be a weight budget -- the Genesis mission travelled much further [genesismission.org], so the energy (and cost) to propel any additional weight would be much more than for the Chinese mission. Thus, it probably wasn't overbuilt.

The third reason is the mission. The Genesis mission had to open up to expose its collectors [nasa.gov], while the chinese mission is a bit unknown. If it was a zero gravity research, its experiments probably didn't need exposure to space. If it produced a massive amount of data that couldn't be transmitted back, the data storage is usually easy to separate from the instruments (including film & camera). Anyone know what it was supposed to do?

Re:No thanks.

[glk572]

The real question is wether you would rather be shat on by a bird or have a satellite fall through your roof; I would prefer the satellite, It would be worth it just for the story, especially if you rent.

Re:I don't understand

[afidel]

Wtf would the landing zone be ANYWHERE near an occupied area? They have this huge basically uninhabited area called the Gobi Desert to land big space probes in with a statistically zero chance of hitting anything. Instead they land it in the middle of one of the more populated parts of the country? That makes zero sense to me.

Re:The roof is on fire!

[Saeger]

Even if it is OK here, a lot of people think it's somehow "sophisticated" or "professional" to self-censor. They're usually over 30 years old and have been conditioned such that never offending and never breaking any rule is a good way to stay safe and keep a job.

--

Re:Eternal optimist? Nah.

[Zerbey]

A satellite landing on you and killing you is infinitely less preferable than it landing on something else. Even if that happens to be your house.

It's all relative, like you said.

Re:First Image

[Dachannien]

The valid point, as has been made many times, is that there is little investigative journalism in the US media.

I'll agree with that statement. Even the CBS Bush document fiasco was the result of CBS journalists being fed information rather than digging up facts for themselves.

Well.... aside from at the local level, and that usually consists of "investigative journalists" harassing and trespassing on the property of some city councillor who was recently arrested for DUI.

Although I am sure we all agree wikipedia is the authoritative and infallible new source,

In the specific case I linked to in my previous post, the Abu Ghraib article was extensive and cited numerous other independent sources. It may not be infallible, but it's certainly as authoritative as any of the sources it cites.

Besides, blog journalism (or distributed or peer-to-peer journalism, if you prefer) is a new driving force in today's media, and it stands to change the way that journalism and politics in the US work between now and the 2008 election. Wikipedia is an extension of that concept.

Re:next year

[Hillman]

I respect your point but I disagree.

I'm not talking about the industrial military complex. But the individual soldier. During the WWII draft, at least here in Quebec, people wanted to go to war to defend their country and their way of life. Some people even committed suicide because they were refused in the army for various health reason.

Soldiers are less willing to do dangerous missions or to be on the front. Hence the developement of technology that permits remote killing or surveillance.

Now, most soldiers want a college education or come from low-income famillies. They don't do it for the country. The sense of duty isn't as important.

I think we're not talking about the same individualism or we don't have the same definition. The individualism I'm talking about is the philosophical concept than the individual is the primary unit of reality and the ultimate standard standard of value opposed to collectivism where the nation, race, group, etc is the primary unit of reality and the ultimate standard of value.(http://rous.redbarn.org/objectivism/Writing /RaymieStata/WhatIsIndividualism.html)

The little theory came from one of my politics+philo teacher, if you want to know more about it, I'll go ask him some references.

Sorry for my poor ass english, I'm french canadian