Chinese booster rocket tumbles back to Earth: 'Non-zero' chance of hitting populated area Space boffins are watching the skies for a 23 metric ton Chinese rocket booster that is expected to crash back to Earth. The debris measures 53.6 meters in length and is a remnant of a mission earlier this week to deliver the Wentian laboratory module to China's Tiangong space station. Wentian itself is an exciting addition to …
You just need to have javascript disabled, and when you you stop at the https://t.co page, examine it and copy the twitter link from there. If you won't actully open a twitter URL, then simply use your favorite search engine and find it that way.
I would, however, prefer that the links in the tweet were unobfsucated in the article, just as a big F.U. to t.co.
We forget. China simply does not care about dropping stuff on people. At home - no issue. Elsewhere, well, the noise will die down eventually.
So NASA huffing and puffing is simply Westerners being fussy as usual.
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Hmmmm gosport or Basingstoke... gosport or Basingstoke.... the choices .. the choices...
Sorry... much as I hate gosport, Basingstoke gets it by a whisker.
Boris
Hint for our non-UK readers.... Basingstoke is a carbon copy of Milton Keynes.. only without the heart and soul of Milton Keynes.....
Umm. Couple of things. I know both Basingstoke and Milton Keynes quite well, and they are streets apart!
Firstly, Basingstoke is older. Most of the new town was built in the 1960's. Milton Keynes is a couple of decades newer, so if they were actually clones, Milton Keynes would be a copy of Basingstoke, but read on.
Secondly, Basingstoke is built as a series of rings, with inner and outer ring roads, and the town originally built in radial segments. Milton Keynes is built on a grid system, with north-south and east-west roads.
Thirdly, when Basingstoke was built, many buildings went up. whereas Milton Keynes was built to be very low profile (OK, there have been some taller buildings built more recently).
Lastly, Basingstoke was built around an older village as a London relocation town (think slum clearance), with a large number of the houses built as council houses, so if you find some Basingstoke 'locals' (not the original Hampshire residents, but those who moved in in the '60s and '70s), you will find various London dialects being very prevalent. Milton Keynes was a true green field 'New Town' with people moving there from all over the country because of jobs, and they ended up buying their houses, and it is thus much more cosmopolitan.
Since it was built, Basingstoke has got worse, with many of the green spaces that were originally left to make life a bit more palatable being filled in by new buildings, although they did tunnel under or fly over most of the roundabouts. Milton Keynes is actually quite pleasant in comparison.
That's a very nominal point. Neither Bletchley nor Newport Pagnell were immediatly subsumed into Milton Keynes. It was more properly built on land between Bletchley and Newport Pagnell, and has now grown out to meet them.
Basingstoke old town (not Old Basing) has now almost completely disappeared under the new(er) shopping centres. When I first visited it in the late 1960's (before they had finished building the original pedestrianized shopping centre (it always stank of chlorine because the swiming pool was right under the middle of the shopping centre), there was still a number of older buildings. There may be one or two left on Wote Street and London Street, but I doubt there is a lot.
Since the original shopping centre was built in the mid-1960s, the centre of Basingstoke has been re-developed at least twice, with the 'new' market square disappearing under Alders, which has itself long since disappeared.
Although I lived in Basingstoke for six years in the mid 1990s, when I visited it a few years ago, I barely recognised the place, and it had not got better!
Space debris isn't what it used to be. When Skylab fell from the sky we were warned even if it hit somewhere like Slough it could set off automated ICBMs and kill us all.
Slough
Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough!
It isn't fit for humans now,
There isn't grass to graze a cow.
Swarm over, Death!
Come, bombs and blow to smithereens
Those air -conditioned, bright canteens,
Tinned fruit, tinned meat, tinned milk, tinned beans,
Tinned minds, tinned breath.
This was published just three years before Slough was bombed by the Nazis.Sixty bombs, two hundred and seventy dead. Betjeman, you were well out of order.
Betjeman was just using Slough as an example of how the countryside was being concreted over.
It isn't though, something like 90% of the country isn't built on. A quick look at Google Earth will show you that.
We're just obsessed with our green belts.
Now, not saying we should concrete it all, but maybe the odd extra house here and there for the younguns might not be a bad idea.
(I mean not in my back yard obviously...)
Yeah. Same problem with people who object to new roads because the country is "already covered in too many of them". It isn't, if their width was shown on maps to actual scale they'd be almost invisible, so they get drawn not-to-scale as thick lines which gives a totally misleading idea of how much of the country they occupy.
Still, Betjeman had a point. There are ways to build new stuff without acres of faceless square boxes of grey concrete.
Well yes, of course. Once you've sold your parents home and can add that to the value of your own, then you can also afford to buy somewhere in the country.
And once there you don't want scum putting up a building you can see from the front room. Hell no. Same goes for wind turbines. I mean, this is Ingerland, don't you know?
It's worth noting that only 5% of the UK's land surface is given over to housing, whilst 2.5% is occupied by golf courses.
It's often those who use the golf courses that object most vociferously to more housing.
Also, vast areas of "undeveloped" countryside are also owned by a vanishingly small number of people. 4% of the country is taken over by grouse moors (which is an unnatural, managed landscape).
Tell this to anyone who goes on about "are country being full," though, and they just blather, get redder in the face and start calling you a "woke snowflake" or something.
"You don't solve town planning problems by dropping bombs all over the place."True. You could miss Slough and hit somewhere much nicer instead. Which, in broad terms, is referring to somewhere other than Slough.
I worked in Slough for a while, it's the only place that I came across fluorescent grey as a colour.
"I worked in Slough for a while, it's the only place that I came across fluorescent grey as a colour."
That seems to be an ever growing popular colour for cars. I just started noticing them recently. Sort of battleship grey in a gloss that somehow manages to look matte!! The first one I noticed, I thought it was just the undercoat and it would be going back for the rest of the paint job.
I was at secondary school in Auckland NZ when skylab came down. At breaks the prefects were poncing about in silly helmets pointing toilet paper tube Binoculars at the sky. The chances of hitting the Auckland isthmus were vanishingly small but in orbital terms it came damn close.
Time to re-brand and re-issue those Skylab Protective Helmets again? Can even be made in China...
Don't say that he's hypocritical
Say rather that he's apolitical
"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That's not my department" say Wernher von Braun
(the song ends with)
You too may be a big hero
Once you've learned to count backwards to zero
"In German, oder Englisch, I know how to count down
Und I'm learning Chinese!" says Wernher von Braun
It seemed unlikely to me that you could make a good case for defamation on the lyrics, especially in the U.S. where both men were living, so I looked for details on the case. Lehrer denies it. Several articles call it a false rumor. I'm not finding a single source that has any proof about it. I'm afraid you may have been given unreliable information.
Now I do know that the odds of it hitting a specific individual are low, but it would be fantastic if it landed very close to Xi Jinping, ideally at or near Zhongnanhai. Now I'm not saying that it should kill them or anything like that, just that it should provide a close enough to death experience that they will fix this problem.
EDIT: Looks like it will miss most of China https://aerospace.org/reentries/cz-5b-rb-id-53240
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