Chinese Space Station Burns Up On Re-entry in South Pacific (reviewjournal.com) 54
cold fjord writes: Chinese space authorities say the defunct Tiangong 1 space station mostly burned up on re-entry into the atmosphere over the central South Pacific. The China Manned Space Engineering Office said the experimental space laboratory re-entered around 8:15 a.m. Monday. Scientists monitoring the craft's disintegrating orbit had forecast the craft would mostly burn up and would pose only the slightest of risks to people. Analysis from the Beijing Aerospace Control Center showed it had mostly burned up. Launched in 2011, Tiangong 1 was China's first space station, serving as an experimental platform for bigger projects, such as the Tiangong 2 launched in September 2016 and a future permanent Chinese space station. Two crews of Chinese astronauts lived on the station while testing docking procedures and other operations. Its last crew departed in 2013 and contact with it was cut in 2016.
Lucky as expected. (Score:1)
Good that it was like skylab no harm to anyone.
Lucky as expected. (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
"Not even "lucky", harming someone would have been very unlucky."
Depends. Some people would have liked being killed by a toilet seat from space, because they would get post-its from Inigo Montoya.
Re: (Score:3)
And, even beyond that, really most of the world that isn't ocean is uninhabited desert or scrubland or tundra.
Hitting a place that has people when you have an object hitting the Earth untargetted is actually quite unlikely.
Re: (Score:2)
Because people are TERRIBLE at assessing risk. People probably felt pangs of fear while hearing the news reports in their car, completely oblivious to the irony.
Re: (Score:2)
Because people are TERRIBLE at assessing risk. People probably felt pangs of fear while hearing the news reports in their car, completely oblivious to the irony.
I don't think they were actually afraid... it's just kindof fun and exciting to think about it.
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe, but there are headlines from organizations as mainstream as Forbes saying New York / Chicago In Potential Crash Path Of Out Of Control Chinese Space Station [forbes.com]. And I've seen absolutely idiotic comments that border on satire online - but that is par for the course. Who knows? Humans are still terrible at risk assessment.
Re: (Score:3)
Right, they could plan that because they were 100% certain that all the fuel and thrusters would survive re-entry.
Uhuh.
Re: (Score:2)
just burn a little sooner, before they would get damaged... when it starts to enter the atmosphere, to give it a little push
Re: Suspect the Chinese have some spare fuel left (Score:1)
The whole point of the uncontrolled re-entry was that they had no communication link, thus no control over the vessel.
Predictions are hard, especially about the future (Score:2)
Even minutes before the splash-down Western authorities were saying that the Tiangong-1 spaceship was aiming for the Atlantic, off the coast of Brazil, at 00:49 GMT, or so
No. I was following this one, and most of the authorities were actually saying we don't know exactly where it will hit, here's the latest update and the best guess for impact, which was always a wide range.
At the very end they were saying "it will enter on this orbit, here's the ground track"-- and the final orbit's ground track passed over the South Atlantic, continued over South Africa, and went on to the Pacific. Where on that final orbit it would hit depended very sensitively on exaclty how it was ori
Re: (Score:1)
Make the unemployed space experts an offer and get their secrets to China.
Remember the FBI and FSB do have surveillance on most of the very best space experts all the time.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Buying the secrets of staying in space is the challenge for China.
Who to approach in Russia, the former Soviet Union, the USA with space job offer.
Re: (Score:2)
The secret to staying in space is actually wanting your object to stay in space, and not designing the mission to de-orbit soon.
Of course, doing that with an experimental station that's only in use briefly would be irresponsible. Nobody wants objects remaining in space beyond their useful lifetime, it's always best if they can be crashed into the atmosphere.
Re: (Score:2)
yeh, right!!! just because those two never had SEVERAL satellites with uncontrolled re-entry
Re: (Score:3)
UTC+8 (Score:5, Informative)
That 08:15 would be Chinese time (UTC+8),
https://www.space.com/40101-china-space-station-tiangong-1-crashes.html [space.com]
Re: Cheap capacitors (Score:2)
Newtonian (Score:1)
Don't forget to get back Sandra Bullock. She's ours!
Burned up over South Pacific? (Score:2)
Hope Patti LuPone wasn't in the cast.
I blame systemd (Score:5, Funny)
These reboots are getting really far fetched. (Score:1)
I mean, why does a musical need crashing burning space stations???