Tiangong-1: Chinese space station will crash to Earth within months | Hacker News Reader

Tiangong-1: Chinese space station will crash to Earth within months

theguardian.com

63 pointsyitosda22 comments

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-2

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_large_modular_space_st...

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

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...

I was thinking about space debris: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_debris

We crash satellites and spacecraft all the time. Most burns up during re-entry, the rest...well that's why they aim for oceans usually.

Every day, an estimated hundred tons of debris (mostly meteoric dust) hits the earth's atmosphere. A satellite is not a big deal; it burns up, possibly with small chunks hitting the surface.

Even if you were directly on the ground track for this thing, you wouldn't notice anything aside from the reentry fireball.

I want a piece of that.

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.

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.

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

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!

Just ignore the moon ninjas episode.

There'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....

I almost added that the idea was free for the taking if someone wanted to write a sci fi story about it. I didn't add it because I felt it might come off too pretentious.

There's a lot of ways it can go, including a tech thriller, espionage, or even recovering something specifically needed in a post apocalyptic world. I'm sure there are more ideas.

It could even be hard science fiction, instead of just fantasy!

Alas, I've too many writing projects on my plate. Run with it, if you want. I'll even read it.

"Ghost Fleet" touches on OP's original idea of laws in space, not so much this idea.

It's a good pulp world war 3 techno novel.

Tricky to make plausible, since most space debris is barely recognizable once it reaches the surface - metals would be deformed and have highly questionable metallurgical characteristics due to the extreme heat of reentry, essentially being of no value beyond raw material for reprocessing, and you'd have an easier time scavenging such things from the ruins of an industrial society - and a much easier time finding scrap in condition to be reused without so much rework.

I could see it as a subplot focused around high-value, highly durable items such as RTGs, though. A device that generates even a low level of electrical power without requiring fuel or favorable environmental conditions could easily have a broad range of uses in a post-apocalyptic story, and they are designed to survive reentry intact so as to avoid dispersing radioactive isotopes into the atmosphere or across the ground.

Defiance had advanced tech/debris falling from the orbiting wrecks of alien ships.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defiance_(TV_series)

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12079880

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)

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

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

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

"Build one to throw away. You will, anyway."

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