The can who fell to Earth

[Elderly Sumo Prophecy]

aw thanks x someone cares!

I'm afraid I only care about the exact details of your imminent demise. Soz.

[touchingcloth]

Yeah space stuff is really stupid and nonsensical. Like, they put a man on the moon but dont have the tech to do it again and they dont have the tapes that show it actually happened.

There's tape's.

[Pearly-Dewdrops Drops]

Seriously what is it with China and disastrous attempts at space shit? Worse than Musk.

This type of "large debris event" happens not infrequently as a result of launching things into space, including by NASA and the European Space Agency. The largest and perhaps most famous is when Skylab fell back down to Earth.

Two guesses why this is suddenly getting wall-to-wall coverage in the Western media to make China look evil and incompetent!

[bgmnts]

There's tape's.

I thought the raw footage was missing?

[mothman]

Well that narrows it down. Don't they have computers? Still, we're safe, so fuck the world.

Bob Geldof and Midge Ure consider rewrite.

[bgmnts]

This type of "large debris event" happens not infrequently as a result of launching things into space, including by NASA and the European Space Agency. The largest and perhaps most famous is when Skylab fell back down to Earth.

Two guesses why this is suddenly getting wall-to-wall coverage in the Western media to make China look evil and incompetent!

Remember that time in the 90s when the US launched a rocket and it immediately fucked up and blew up a nearby village, where the govt said only six people died?

[touchingcloth]

I thought the raw footage was missing?

Nah, the tape's are their.

[Pinball]

Two guesses why this is suddenly getting wall-to-wall coverage in the Western media to make China look evil and incompetent!

Are you inferring that the CCP isn't evil and incompetent? Bot!!

[Elderly Sumo Prophecy]

This type of "large debris event" happens not infrequently as a result of launching things into space, including by NASA and the European Space Agency. The largest and perhaps most famous is when Skylab fell back down to Earth.

Two guesses why this is suddenly getting wall-to-wall coverage in the Western media to make China look evil and incompetent!

[Pearly-Dewdrops Drops]

Remember that time in the 90s when the US launched a rocket and it immediately fucked up and blew up a nearby village, where the govt said only six people died?

Cheering on a tragic disaster to win some nonexistent "us vs. them" pissing contest. (Never mind the completely spotless record of the U.S. space program.)

[Dex Sawash]

sadly it looks like there is very little chance of me getting absolutely flattened beyond all hope by the Big Chinese Rocket Segment

Have they got the continents aligned correctly?
NY further south than most of Europe?

[bgmnts]

Cheering it on eh? I was just demonstrating how shit your favourite government is.

[Gregory Torso]

shakes fist at the sky "CHINA!!!!!!!"

[Elderly Sumo Prophecy]

Have they got the continents aligned correctly?
NY further south than most of Europe?

Yep. Shows how much we rely on the Gulf Stream. If it wasn't for that, it'd be considerably colder here. If you check on the map, the UK is roughly on the same line of latitude as Newfoundland.

[Mr Farenheit]

Have they got the continents aligned correctly?
NY further south than most of Europe?

Don't believe maps you see in the MSM

[Gurke and Hare]

To be fair, the CCP are definitely not evil and incompetent. Unfortunately, they're evil and competent.

[Zetetic]

This type of "large debris event" happens not infrequently as a result of launching things into space

There's an elision here between break-up events in orbit (which is what the term "large debris event" would usually describe), at least partially controlled re-entry of large objects (e.g. Mir, Shuttle boosters) where you have a decent idea of the path that will be taken from the start, and largely uncontrolled re-entry of large objects (e.g. this) where you've little idea of exactly what's coming out of the sky and where.

(Skylab is somewhere between the last two? And since it happened - getting on for half-a-century ago - the general view seems to be "don't do that".)

[mothman]

During that, I remember having a dream where I looked out one morning to see that Skylab had landed - intact - in my grandparents' back garden. Funny I remember that now and not, say, when I was going through the Skylab mock-up at the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum.[nb]Though I was mainly engrossed in listening to the conversation going on behind me, an American telling his preteen son all about the Skylab programme. It was quite lovely, the kid was agog; there's another lifetime fascination with space gestated right there, I thought.[/nb]

[Dex Sawash]

Pretty dangerous stuff bigging up a filthy commie spaceship to a youth.

[mothman]

Skylab was a commie spaceship?

[shiftwork2]

Nah, yanks.  I have a vivid memory of a summer evening with the Kenny Everett Video Show on TV and everyone was talking about whether it was about to land on their house / their nana.

edit: Oh I see.

[Ambient Sheep]

First read about this on PPRuNe on Wednesday night; pilots reacting to "Pilot organizations circulating bulletins alerting aviators to pending imminent uncontrolled re-entry of large rocket booster".

I meant to start a thread on here but dozed off, and then forgot.

Anyway, here's one poster's take in response to someone mentioning "China Bashing":

Mir was intentionally de-orbited over a mostly unpopulated area using the reaction control system that was installed for that purpose. It hit reasonably close to the pre-planned and pre-announced impact point.

Skylab was intended to be re-boosted during the Skylab V mission, which was cancelled for budgetary reasons as the Shuttle was coming online soon and could do the mission cheaper. Then due to Shuttle program delays the Shuttle was not available to re-boost the station, therefore it re-entered uncontrolled. But that was not the baseline plan, it was a failure of program management and contingency planning.

Uncontrolled de-orbit was the baseline plan for the Long March 5B. And it was launched in 2021, not in 1973. What was once acceptable is now unacceptable, in rocketry and many other fields. We've upped our standards, so up yours.

Well said.

[Pearly-Dewdrops Drops]

There's an elision here between break-up events in orbit (which is what the term "large debris event" would usually describe), at least partially controlled re-entry of large objects (e.g. Mir, Shuttle boosters) where you have a decent idea of the path that will be taken from the start, and largely uncontrolled re-entry of large objects (e.g. this) where you've little idea of exactly what's coming out of the sky and where.

(Skylab is somewhere between the last two? And since it happened - getting on for half-a-century ago - the general view seems to be "don't do that".)

Not really. This most recent object is indicated in green:



It's less common in recent decades coincidentally because the U.S. has already made its own closely guarded technological developments and substantially downsized its own space program - funny how the "general view" develops at that point.

Well said.

Is the U.S. willing to hand over its launch technology to China, or is the premise here that all developing countries must stay in "their place" now that the West has finished? Perhaps if the former were not dead set on starting a new cold war in which any economic rival is deemed a military adversary.

[Zetetic]

Notably 'DOS-6' (Soviet space station Salyut 7) and STS-107 (the remains of the US Space Shuttle Columbia) weren't deliberate.

The former being partially-controlled (with an intended re-entry path taking it away from populated areas) with a slight fuck-up, and the latter being a major fuck-up.

Edit: The image posted above is from this thread:
https://twitter.com/planet4589/status/1389065477406724097

[Zetetic]

Pearly-Dewdrops Drops, are you suggesting that China is technologically incapable of planning re-entries for this sort of thing?

[Elderly Sumo Prophecy]

Down with this sort of thing! (Literally)

[Dex Sawash]

Skylab was a commie spaceship?

Oh, Soyuz

[Pearly-Dewdrops Drops]

Pearly-Dewdrops Drops, are you suggesting that China is technologically incapable of planning re-entries for this sort of thing?

I'm certainly not qualified to pass on the technology involved here or why the Long March 5B is designed the way it is, but the Chinese government is still independently developing its space program with short-term goals (including a crewed expedition to the Moon) that mirror what the U.S. and the Soviet Union were doing in the 1960s-70s. I think the motives behind the sensationalist coverage of this miniscule-risk event are questionable considering the U.S. had no problem with many large uncontrolled re-entries back when it was still developing its own space program.

The notion that "it's 2021 not 1971" doesn't make much sense to me. I'm sure China would prefer to have developed its space program back then, but at the time it was still one of the poorest countries on Earth due to a century of outside domination. Perhaps the technology could be improved so that an uncontrolled reentry is unnecessary if the U.S. were willing to share its own developments - but that will never happen because the U.S. wants to maintain a massive military advantage over the rest of the planet, and "space is the next frontier".

The U.S. has actively banned China or any organization affiliated with China from having access to anything that might help their own space program.

[JesusAndYourBush]

I thought the raw footage was missing?

The footage that exists was filmed by pointing a camera at a screen.  The "tapes" that get mentioned from time to time were tapes of the actual video data - not off the screen.  They were in a nonstandard format and at the time I don't even think they had a machine that could play them back.  Obviously if we had the tapes it wouldn't be hard for someone to work out a way of extracting a signal, and the picture we assume would be sharper than the one filmed off the screen, but the tapes were discarded so we'll never know how much better the footage might look.

[Pinball]

The amount of space debris dramatically increased after a Chinese anti-satellite missile test in 2007. This is the main issue I have with their space administration, as it was incredibly dumb and dangerous. By comparison, the present uncontrolled re-entry was relatively competent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Chinese_anti-satellite_missile_test

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn10999-anti-satellite-test-generates-dangerous-space-debris/

"Millions of new pieces of space junk may have been generated during a Chinese test of an anti-satellite weapon last week, US officials worry. The debris could be dangerous for existing satellites – and even for astronauts aboard the International Space Station and the space shuttle – for years to come.

On 11 January, China launched a missile from or near the Xichang Space Centre in the southwestern province of Sichuan. This likely released a projectile that slammed into one of its derelict polar-orbiting weather satellites, known as Feng Yun 1C, which flew at an altitude of about 800 kilometres.

The collision created about 40,000 pieces of debris larger than 1 centimetre, estimates David Wright, co-director of the global security programme at the Union of Concerned Scientists in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US.

That will nearly double the amount of debris of that size at similar altitudes, he told New Scientist. It may also have created 2 million fragments wider than 1 millimetre across.

Such altitudes are heavily trafficked by imaging, meteorological, surveillance, remote-sensing and communications satellites. These spacecraft could be seriously damaged if they were hit by the debris, which can travel at 7.5 kilometres per second – 30 times faster than a jet aircraft."