What's Chinese and crashing in flames? No, not its economy – its crocked space station The first space station lofted into orbit by China is coming down next year, the country's space agency has confirmed. The Tiangong-1 mini-station was launched on 29 September 2011, and has been visited by three manned missions. Its size is nothing on the scale of the International Space Station – Tiangong-1 is just 12 meters …
Meteorblitzkrieg.
One wonders if there's time to send one of Cannae's prototype thrusters to dock with Tiangong-1 and at least stabilize the orbit so it isn't uncontrolled. Sure it won't be able to prevent the inevitable but its one step closer to a fully autonomous space tug.
Caveat: my modified drive is 10* more efficient (2-30uN/W) but based on current funding levels it will be working about a month after the space elevator is completed unfortunately.
If anyone wants to help out message me.
It's extremely unlikely, but I do wonder what would happen if a piece of spacecraft debris were to actually cause some real damage when it came back down to earth.
Imagine if a piece of this space station were to hit your home. Would your insurance cover it? Would your insurers try to sue the owners of the space station? It sounds like the sort of thing that could get very messy very quickly. So it's a good thing it's so unlikely.
(To explain Francis Boyle's joke above; When bits of Skylab hit Australia, a local council sent NASA a A$400 fine for littering, which was eventually paid by a radio station. Don't upvote me, upvote Francis)
"It's extremely unlikely, but I do wonder what would happen if a piece of spacecraft debris were to actually cause some real damage when it came back down to earth."
Premise (well, one of them) of Dead Like Me*. (Does anyone else sometimes feel they are working for Happy Time?)
* Season 1 - brilliant, season 2 - so-so, has some very good bits, though, movie - don't bother.
Since you mention it: Yes, my insurance does cover man-made space debris. It does not, however, cover airplanes nor non-man-made space debris.
I fully anticipate the lawyers and adjusters claiming that, as it has now broken up due to natural forces, the station no longer qualifies as man-made.
When I read "MOST of it will burn op on re-entry", my mind immediately translates that as "NOT ALL OF IT will burn up on re-entry" (years of reading IT press releases and government announcements does that to you) which leads me to the question "OK, what about the pieces that do NOT burn up"?
According to the Guardian, there could be residual pieces weighing up to 100kg. I'm no scientist, but a 100kg glowing chunk of metal at well above terminal velocity is not going to do "splat" when it lands, that packs enough kinetic to make quite a crater and side effects. If that hits a person I doubt there will be enough found in the resulting crater to know for sure who it actually hit so I certainly hope there residual bits land in sea.
I believe the Guardian article quotes someone saying that if a 100kg engine part hit you on the head, it might hurt!
Whereas I'd argue it's unlikely to hurt at all - because you won't be alive long enough to notice. It was certainly an interesting piece of undersatement.
As much as I'd like to blame the Chinese space boffins, they're still relatively new to all of this, so the occasional whoopsie is to be expected; were it an American or Russian mission, there'd be a lot more deserved finger pointing. With luck, any large, heavy chunks will go splash rather than vaporize someone's national monument or a charming wee school filled with winsome kiddies. I'm slightly more concerned that their deputy director, Wu Ping (née Crane), transliterates as potentially hilarious, as space comedy rarely ends well (notwithstanding GoTG or Dark Star). I'd be yet more concerned were she related to violinist Yee Ping (née Yizards!), which would just up the ante. Yes, I'm blind drunk at the moment.
Take a look at satellite photos of our humble home. The densely-populated zones are quite small given the surface area of the planet. Outside of cities, there's a fair bit of space (as a percentage) between dwellings and other buildings.
With that said, improbable does not equal impossible so it's only a matter of time.Wanna start a pool on where the first human killed by space junk impact will be?
Fair enough idea but the two basic problems are that it's not so much a "Station" anymore as an out of control spinning bus, and the Chinese have no current "Shuttle" program to try to catch the bus. As someone else sort of implied, they could play Space Invaders with it, but that wouldn't do the rest of the orbital things that aren't currently junk from becoming such (and you do NOT want any more debris up there, the cloud is thick enough as it is, thanks very much). So, no.
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