China’s Tiangong-1 space station is not out of control and does not pose a safety threat, a top Chinese spaceflight engineer said yesterday after reports that the station was falling toward Earth.
The Tiangong-1, or “Heavenly Palace 1,” China’s first space lab, was launched into orbit in 2011 to carry out docking and orbit experiments as part of China’s ambitious space program, which aims to place a permanent station in orbit by 2023.
Tiangong-1 was originally planned to be decommissioned in 2013, but China has repeatedly extended the length of its mission. The delay of re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere, which China said would happen late last year, had led some experts to suggest that the space laboratory might be out of control.
China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp top engineer Zhu Congpeng told the state-backed Science and Technology Daily newspaper that the space station was not crashing and did not pose a safety or environmental threat.
“We have been continuously monitoring Tiangong-1 and expect to allow it to fall within the first half of this year,” Zhu said. “It will burn up on entering the atmosphere and the remaining wreckage will fall into a designated area of the sea, without endangering the surface.”
Re-entry was delayed in September last year to ensure that the wreckage would fall into an area of the South Pacific where debris from Russian and US space stations had previously landed, the paper said.
The California-based Aerospace Corp, a non-profit group that works the US government, said Tiangong-1’s re-entry was unlikely to be controlled, but was highly unlikely to hit people or damage property, according to a post on its Web site last updated on Wednesday last week.
“Although not declared officially, it is suspected that control of Tiangong-1 was lost and will not be regained before re-entry,” it said.
There might be hazardous material on board that could survive re-entry, it added.
Advancing the nation’s space program is a priority for Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), who has called for China to become a global space power with both advanced civilian space flight and capabilities that strengthen national security.
Beijing says that its space program is for peaceful purposes, but the US Department of Defense has said China’s program could be aimed at blocking adversaries from using space-based assets during a crisis.
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