The past week, before its demise in the atmosphere over the South Pacific Ocean, Tiangong-1 was, naturally, the subject of quite a bit of news coverage. Of course, that meant commentary from the peanut gallery, as they say – everyone decided to toss out a comment, or a question. While some were intelligent, many just […]
Something I like about the Internet is how quickly people will update you when information is out of date or incorrect. In this case, I have been following what sources I could on Tiangong-1 when someone on twitter alerted me that it had already been confirmed to have re-entered, in this case, at 5:16PM Pacific […]
By the time most people read this, the event will already have happened and I will have my follow-up article on the subject, but for now, this is still worth writing about. UPDATE: It re-entered at 8:16 PM Central Daylight Time – https://www.xadara.com/tiangong-1-is-gone/ Tiangong-1 is now estimate by the European Space Agency to re-enter sometime […]
Back in October I gave a status update on Tiangong-1, China’s first Space Station, and how, since the end of crewed operations, contact and control of the station has been lost. Well, we are approaching the final week or so of the stations time in orbit, and the situation hasn’t changed – it’s still out […]
Forgive me for the title – I needed something that wasn’t the same “Tiangong-1 Will Crash Into Earth” article title that every other place covering this seems to be using. The statement is true, though. For whatever reason, contact and control of Tiangong-1 was lost in early 2016, and over the past year and a […]
Tianzhou 1, a Chinese prototype space freighter launched back in April, finally ended its mission successfully on September 22nd by burning up in the Earths atmosphere. This, of course, is a standard method of disposal for such craft (the Russian Progress cargo vehicle is a fine example) so that they don’t become typical space debris. […]
China’s space program is moving along nicely – on the 20th we had the launch of the Tianzhou 1 cargo craft, it successfully docking with their Tiangong-2 space station today, the 22nd. This launch not only marks China’s first automated docking and first flight of their future space station resupply vehicle, but also, thanks to […]