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Tiangong-1: Chinese space station will crash to Earth within months
- yitosda 9y agoPreviously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12079880 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12079880
- ChuckMcM 9y agoThen 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)
- extide 9y agoFWIW, Mir was definitely not Russia's first station, and not even the first one to re-enter uncontrolled.
- mtve 9y ago"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
- throwanem 9y ago"Build one to throw away. You will, anyway."
- lolc 9y agoI want a piece of that.
- KGIII 9y agoTheoretically 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.
- GuiA 9y agoThere’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.
- ctchocula 9y agoThere 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
- TeMPOraL 9y agoAlso 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!
- robin_reala 9y agoJust ignore the moon ninjas episode.
- rudilee 9y agoThere's this story[1] from Compelling Sci-Fi issue 8 that might quite close on the fallen space junk scavenging part. [1] http://compellingsciencefiction.com/stories/the-dirt-dances.html http://compellingsciencefiction.com/stories/the-dirt-dances....
- jpatokal 9y agoMissing 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_station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_large_modular_space_st...
- bjourne 9y agoIf it crashes to earth, wont it release large amount of debris in the atmosphere?
- FooBarWidget 9y ago90% 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-skylab-400-littering-fine-paid-by-dj https://science.slashdot.org/story/09/07/14/1556228/nasas-sk...
- bjourne 9y agoI was thinking about space debris: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_debris https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_debris
- FussyZeus 9y agoWe crash satellites and spacecraft all the time. Most burns up during re-entry, the rest...well that's why they aim for oceans usually.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]