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Comment by rqs | Hacker News Reader

Well, I hope AVIC do some serious investigation on this, because there is another station (Tiangong-2) up there, it could be really bad if it had the same problem cause such defunct.

In fact, I also hope they go one step further, publish the result of their investigation and explain it to the public.

As a person who grew up watching a lot's of (pirated) Discovery shows (on provincial TV channel, LOL), I always found people who trying to research something in order to discover the truth are fascinating and made me a big fan of science (despite I did really bad at school).

If scientists in China did figured out and learned what went wrong, they may as well notify the public, it could be very educational maybe even inspiring.

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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.

btw no one know how to deorbit ISS

That’s simply untrue:

https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/578543main_asap_eol_plan_2010_10102...

https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2013/08/bringing-down-iss-pl...

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/199600...

https://standards.nasa.gov/standard/nasa/nasa-std-871914

yep .. but not controlled (as parent implied) .. simply because there is so many variable and the mass is enormous. Standard model can't handle that. I'm just summing a section dedicated to that in Science & Vie [No 1175], august 2015.

We know how to start the process, but the disintegration of so many heavy part is intractable .. some part will touch ground, but we can't tell where with certainty.

Nice pdf.

edit: years

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