China’s Losses: Space Station Tiangong-1

China's most ambitious space program will be on hold, as the space station Tiangong-1 re-entered the earth's atmosphere and burnt up over the middle of the South Pacific on Monday. This way, it gave a fiery end to what was once recognized as China's high profile space projects, thereby halting the country space mission for a few more years.

Tiangong-1 was launched in 2011 as part of the China's ambitious space program, which aims to place a permanent station in orbit by 2023, but unfortunately Tiangong-1 stopped working in March 2016.

The space station, which is 12 meters long, weighs about 8.5 tonnes was launched by China's National Space Administration without anyone aboard on September, 2011 to an orbit about 217 miles (350 kilometers) above Earth. That is slightly lower than the orbit of the much larger International Space Station, whose average altitude is 250 miles (400 km).

The decommissioning of Tiangong-1 was originally planned for in the year 2013 but its was repeatedly extended. But when the space station finally lost all contact from China’s space program in 2016, experts had been waiting for the crash, which has by then become inevitable.

With the failure of the space station, China sent another space lab, Tiangong-2 into the orbit in September 2016 to carry forward its work to achieve the goal of having a crewed space station by 2022.

China also plans to send a manned mission to the moon in the future and send a rover to Mars. It has only last week confirmed training of its astronauts is underway. China also has repeated its plans to assemble it in space in 2020 and will become fully operational in 2022. 

The main purpose, with which Tiangong-1 was sent to space, was to help China master the technology required in assembling and operating a bona-fide space station in Earth orbit, a goal the nation aims to achieve by the early 2020s.

As soon as it reached the space it was working wonderfully. On November 2011, the robotic Shenzhou-8 spacecraft visited Tiangong-1, executing China's first-ever orbital docking. In June 2012 it achieved a milestone, when a three-member crew linked their Shenzhou 9 vehicle to the space station and came aboard for a spell.

In June 2013, three more astronauts visited Tiangong-1, traveling on the Shenzhou-10 spacecraft. Each of these crewed missions lasted about two weeks. During one such expedition, China’s first female astronaut Wang Yaping delivered a lecture from space lab to students back on Earth. During Tiangong-1 lifespan it successfully docked with three spacecrafts. 

As Tiangong-1's design lifetime was just two years, and the space lab's work was mostly done after Shenzhou-10 departed. But it continued to work for the researchers and engineers, who kept in touch with it till March 2016, when data transmission between Tiangong-1 and its handlers stopped, for reasons that China never explicitly specified. At that point, an uncontrolled atmospheric re-entry was apparently inevitable.

The space station, which is of the size of a school bus finally crashed on Earth over the South Pacific. At the time of crash it has been travelling about 27,000 kilometers per hour, but once it reached around 70km above the surface, the intense heat of re-entry melted the craft and it began to break apart, breaking into burning fragments.

China’s Manned Space Engineering Office (CMSEO) has confirmed the space station has re-entered atmosphere and mostly burned up.

The Chinese government has informed the United Nations in May 2017 that the space station has “ceased functioning” in March 2016. The uncontrolled re-entry of the space lab has also been a blot on China’s space program, as it goes against international best practice. 

In October last year, Flinders University space archaeology expert Alice Gorman said China would not be able to control its landing. “Contact has been lost with the spacecraft, so apart from monitoring its position the re-entry is uncontrolled,” she said. But in comparison it was a smooth crash.

Russia’s 135-ton Mir Station in 2001 was the last space station to re enter earth, though it made a controlled landing with most parts breaking up in the atmosphere.

It is a common phenomenon as debris from satellites, space launches and the International Space Station enters the atmosphere every few months, but it directly doesn’t harm inhabitants, only one person is known to had been hit by any of it, so far. US Citizen Lottie Williams was struck but not injured by a falling piece of a US Delta II rocket while exercising in an Oklahoma park in 1997.

The Columbia space shuttle killed all seven astronauts while making the re-entry in the year 2013 sending more than 80,000 pieces of debris raining down on a large swath of the Southern United States. No one on the ground was injured.

China began its first manned spaceflight program in 1990 with the support of Russian space technology that enabled it to become the third country with the ability to launch humans into space, following the former Soviet Union and the United States.