
Tiangong-1: Chinese space station will crash to Earth within months - yitosda
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/oct/13/tiangong-1-chinese-space-station-will-crash-to-earth-within-months
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jpatokal
Missing context: this is working as intended. Tiangong-1 was China's first
space station demonstrator ("target vehicle", in official parlance) and barely
larger than the Shenzhou spacecraft used to fly there, itself essentially a
modernized copy of the 1960s-vintage Soviet Soyuz craft. It has already been
succeeded by Tiangong-2 "space laboratory", which is also at end of life
(operational but no further missions planned), and will be succeeded around
2019 by China's first "real" space station, which will be modular and designed
for lengthy stays in space.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiangong-1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiangong-1)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiangong-2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiangong-2)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_large_modular_space_st...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_large_modular_space_station)

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bjourne
If it crashes to earth, wont it release large amount of debris in the
atmosphere?

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FooBarWidget
90% of the debris burns up in the atmosphere. The remaining 10% -- who knows
where they end up, but it is said that it's unlikely that the debris hit
anything important.

This isn't the first time something like this happened. When NASA's SkyLab
fell to earth in 1979, an Australian town fined them $400 -- for littering.
[https://science.slashdot.org/story/09/07/14/1556228/nasas-
sk...](https://science.slashdot.org/story/09/07/14/1556228/nasas-
skylab-400-littering-fine-paid-by-dj)

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bjourne
I was thinking about space debris:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_debris](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_debris)

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lolc
I want a piece of that.

~~~
KGIII
Theoretically possible, highly technical. Also, really expensive and it might
make some people mad.

Are there actual space junk claiming rules, like that of sea wrecks? I could
see someone just going up and stealing/taking a classified satellite before it
de-orbited.

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GuiA
There’s a great premise for a sci-fi novel - an earth where machinery falls
from the sky on a perpetual basis, due to it being more advantageous to send
new objects rather than repair/upgrade the existing ones. Groups of scavengers
track these impacts to salvage pieces and build their own machinery.

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ctchocula
There is an anime that is based around this concept where the future Earth is
filled with too much space debris, so the protagonist joins in a new type of
garbagemen (garbagewomen) to go on spacewalks to retrieve space debris. It's
one of my favourite animes, since it doesn't deal with teenage drama like most
anime.

[1]
[https://myanimelist.net/anime/329/Planetes](https://myanimelist.net/anime/329/Planetes)

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TeMPOraL
Also it's relatively hard sci-fi for what you can find on TV - it tries to
stay very close to the real physics, including orbital mechanics. I second the
recommendation!

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yitosda
Previously:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12079880](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12079880)

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ChuckMcM
Then it was only suspected, now it is headed in. One good solar flare to poof
up the atmosphere and down it will come.

I guess the Chinese figured you always burn up your first space station.
(Skylab, Mir)

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extide
FWIW, Mir was definitely not Russia's first station, and not even the first
one to re-enter uncontrolled.

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mtve
"The deorbit of Mir was the controlled atmospheric re-entry"[1]

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deorbit_of_Mir](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deorbit_of_Mir)

