Knock, knock? Who’s There? An 8.5 metric ton Chinese space station that no one can control and is going to crash into Earth at some point late next year. Sometime late next year, this is going to potentiall be a really bad day for someone, somewhere on this planet. You see, after months of just admitting that they’ve been having trouble maintaining contact with their Tiangong-1 space station, they’ve now admitted that they have no control over it whatsoever, and that it is coming back to earth in late 2017. The unfortunate part of that is the manner in which it will be returning to the planet.
The Chinese PR team are referring to it as “natural re-entry.” In layman’s terms, that means that it’s going to come back to Earth via the power of gravity and crash wherever it damn well pleases. The good news, if there is some, is that Wu Ping, deputy director of China’s manned space engineering office said: “Based on our calculation and analysis, most parts of the space lab will burn up during falling.”
That’s great, unless you are lucky enough to be under one of the pieces that doesn’t burn up. Maybe you’ll get lucky and get hit by the toilet seat. At least that way, you might have a chance of picking up some post mortem employment as a reaper.
Here’s a video of the Tiangong-1 (Heavenly Palace) Space Station, taking off: