Tuesday, September 20, 2016

China loses control of it's space station.

China's Tiangong-1 space station has been orbiting the planet for about 5 years now, but recently it was decommissioned and the Chinese astronauts returned to the surface. In a press conference last week, China announced that the space station would be falling back to earth at some point in late 2017.
Normally, a decommissioned satellite or space station would be retired by forcing it to burn up in the atmosphere. This type of burn is controlled, and most satellite re-entries are scheduled to burn up over the ocean to avoid endangering people. However, it seems that China's space agency is not sure exactly when Tiangong-1 will re-enter the atmosphere, which implies that the station has been damaged somehow and China is no longer able to control it.

                       Coming down on your head next year, sometime.

6 comments:

  1. Sandra Bullock could guide it down safely, and look good whilst doing so.

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  2. That's a lot of meat to be auguring down -- to land wherever.

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    1. Yeah. Imagine the molten bit of that thing coming down in - say - mid town Manhattan.

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    2. Only way to prevent with 100% certainty that large chunks don't land in an inconvenient spot is to make sure that *before* re-entry, it is turned into sufficiently *small* chunks...

      Or find a way to 'nudge' it so that it lands where you want it to. Hey! I meant the middle of the Pacific! Honest! ;-)

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  3. No problemo! NASA just needs to hire Bruce Willis, his spunky daughter and some intepid oilmen to go up & lasso that thing (the guys will probably insist that they'll never have to pay taxes again, which seems fair.)

    Then they just ride it down to Texas, where they'll make a roadside attraction out of it, right next to the armadillo display. They could call it the Long Gong Returns!

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