Is China’s space station falling?

Five years ago, China launched a space station prototype into low Earth orbit. Next year, it comes crashing back down. The eight and a half ton space station module is called Tiangong-1, also known as the Heavenly Palace. It's part of China's strategy to create a large, modular space station made up of interlocking parts. And by most reports, everything was going as planned until recently. Back in June of 2016, satellite tracker Thomas Dorman alerted Space.com that, based on his observations, China had lost control of Tiangong-1. He predicted that Chinese authorities would hold off announcing a problem with the module until the “last minute.” Flash forward to September 14, 2016. That's when representatives from China's space program held a press conference announcing that the module would reenter Earth's atmosphere in the next few months. While no one admitted that things weren't going as planned, there was a lot of ambiguity in the announcement itself. Here's what we do know. Tiangong-1 was always meant to be a short-term experiment with an operational life of about two years.

That means China completed the primary mission objectives back in 2013. At that point, the lab went into sleep mode. China continued to monitor the module. In March, 2016, China officially decommissioned the space lab. At the time, it sounded like China had a plan to deorbit the module. But based on Dorman's observations and other experts, it looks like something went wrong. The module seems like it will deorbit but in an uncontrolled way. Most of the module will burn up on reentry. But there are some elements, such as the rocket engines, that are dense enough to survive the descent through Earth's atmosphere. These pieces could become a localized threat. They aren't big enough to cause massive damage, but one could certainly rip through the roof of a building or crush a vehicle. The odds are good that any surviving pieces would crash into the ocean or an uninhabited region. There's an awful lot of surface area on Earth that isn't populated. But that doesn't mean we're definitely in the clear.

There's no way to be sure -- even as the station deorbits, we won't have enough data to predict when and where pieces may land until it's actually happening. I guess the moral to this story is that science is hard and sometimes it falls out of the sky. I think it's only fair to mention that a deorbit in 2016 or 2017 appeared to be the plan all along. It just looks like a malfunction has turned this more into a Skylab situation and less of a Mir scenario. It's time to come back to Earth,