China's defunct space lab expected to re-enter Earth's atmosphere this weekend

Exactly.

> China was excluded from the 420-ton International Space Station mainly due to U.S. legislation barring such cooperation and concerns over the Chinese space program's strong military connections.

This is such BS. All our space programs have strong military connections. We literally created our first spacecrafts from German missile designs.

China will do great without us. They don't need us. They have the money and the talent now. They already got planes, boats, nuclear plants and bombs, satellites...

So the only thing this achieves is decreasing trust and cooperation among powerful countries in the world, and duplicate efforts and resource spendings. We managed to cooperate with Russia. We should try to do the same with China.

I'm going back to listen again to the audio book of "The Martian", at least it will makes me smile and in there, Chinese and American scientists bypass politics to help each others.

As far as I know Tiangong-1 was never planned to orbit for long. As its the first chinese orbital station, its mission was to test deployment and orbital docking capabilities. And that was accomplished. There was a malfunction, in the sense that the station did lose its communication and control capabilities, but it was clear that the station would deorbit sooner or later. Stations on low earth orbit still need fuel to maintain altitude, because earths gravity and friction in the high atmosphere tend to pull it earthwards slowly. Cut the fuel supply and the station deorbits inevitably. Same thing happened with Skylab and Mir btw. -- with the exception that the deorbiting procedure was a planned and controlled event.