Excerpt from article towards the end: "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. China's space program remains highly secretive and some experts have complained that a lack of information about Tiangong 1's design has made it harder to predict what might happen upon its re-entry."
I guess it makes sense that they'd be secretive if someone excluded them from the club based on concerns that also apply to existing members.
> 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.
One potential bright side: perhaps China is avoiding dogmatic group think and innovating in ways that have not occurred to the rest of the space community and one day, we might be able to fold their unique insights into our own. Probably not. But maybe.
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.
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.
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.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 24.6 ms ] threadI guess it makes sense that they'd be secretive if someone excluded them from the club based on concerns that also apply to existing members.
> 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.
This can be good and bad, but it will definitely be different.
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.
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
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