Chinese runaway space station will crash to Earth within months, expert warns

Chinese space station to come crashing back down to Earth

An artist’s impression of the Tiangong-1 space laboratory in orbit

The first prototype Space Station of China Tiangong-1 will crash on Earth in the late 2017 or at the beginning of 2018, the Guardian reported.

"Now, when the perigee (nearest to the Earth point of the orbit of an artificial satellite) is below 300 km, the module is more dense the atmosphere, and the rate of fall of the station increases", he said.

The space station, whose name means "Heavenly Palace", performed well for China during its stint in space, but its handlers here on Earth eventually lost complete control over it, admitting many months ago that the spacecraft would eventually crash back down to Earth. It was used for both manned and unmanned missions and was visited by China's first female astronaut, Liu Yang, in 2012.

According to The Guardian, China's space agency has notified the United Nations that it expects Tiangong-1 to crash between October 2017 and April 2018.

Chinese space agency referred its space station as the "Heavenly Palace, " and it was launched with a hope to make China a superpower in space.

The station will reduce significantly in size as the Earth's atmosphere burns it up. He also says that it may cause harm to human beings on Earth.


"Our overall goal is that, by around 2030, China will be among the major space powers of the world", declared deputy chief of the National Space Administration, Wu Yanhua, in a statement. But now, the space station is decaying and traveling towards Earth rapidly. It fell over Argentina and its debris spread over its city named Capitán Bermúdez. As the Guardian noted, on several occasions spacecraft like NASA's monstrously huge, 77.5-ton Skylab or Upper Atmospheric Research Satellite have made uncontrolled descents towards the Earth, but none of them have ever been found to have killed or hurt anyone.

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