11–20 of 25 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then it was only suspected, now it is headed in. One good solar flare to poof up the atmosphere and down it will come. I guess the Chinese figured you always burn up your first space station. (Skylab, Mir)
FWIW, Mir was definitely not Russia's first station, and not even the first one to re-enter uncontrolled.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Theoretically possible, highly technical. Also, really expensive and it might make some people mad. Are there actual space junk claiming rules, like that of sea wrecks? I could see someone just going up and stealing/taking a classified satellite before it de-orbited.
There’s a great premise for a sci-fi novel - an earth where machinery falls from the sky on a perpetual basis, due to it being more advantageous to send new objects rather than repair/upgrade the existing ones. Groups of scavengers track these impacts to salvage pieces and build their own machinery.
It's a good pulp world war 3 techno novel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiangong-1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiangong-2
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_large_modular_space_st...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There’s a great premise for a sci-fi novel - an earth where machinery falls from the sky on a perpetual basis, due to it being more advantageous to send new objects rather than repair/upgrade the existing ones. Groups of scavengers track these impacts to salvage pieces and build their own machinery.
There is an anime that is based around this concept where the future Earth is filled with too much space debris, so the protagonist joins in a new type of garbagemen (garbagewomen) to go on spacewalks to retrieve space debris. It's one of my favourite animes, since it doesn't deal with teenage drama like most anime. [1] https://myanimelist.net/anime/329/Planetes
Missing context: this is working as intended. Tiangong-1 was China's first space station demonstrator ("target vehicle", in official parlance) and barely larger than the Shenzhou spacecraft used to fly there, itself essentially a modernized copy of the 1960s-vintage Soviet Soyuz craft. It has already been succeeded by Tiangong-2 "space laboratory", which is also at end of life (operational but no further missions pla…
Missing context: this is working as intended. Tiangong-1 was China's first space station demonstrator ("target vehicle", in official parlance) and barely larger than the Shenzhou spacecraft used to fly there, itself essentially a modernized copy of the 1960s-vintage Soviet Soyuz craft. It has already been succeeded by Tiangong-2 "space laboratory", which is also at end of life (operational but no further missions pla…
If it crashes to earth, wont it release large amount of debris in the atmosphere?
This isn't the first time something like this happened. When NASA's SkyLab fell to earth in 1979, an Australian town fined them $400 -- for littering. https://science.slashdot.org/story/09/07/14/1556228/nasas-sk...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There’s a great premise for a sci-fi novel - an earth where machinery falls from the sky on a perpetual basis, due to it being more advantageous to send new objects rather than repair/upgrade the existing ones. Groups of scavengers track these impacts to salvage pieces and build their own machinery.
There is an anime that is based around this concept where the future Earth is filled with too much space debris, so the protagonist joins in a new type of garbagemen (garbagewomen) to go on spacewalks to retrieve space debris. It's one of my favourite animes, since it doesn't deal with teenage drama like most anime. [1] https://myanimelist.net/anime/329/Planetes
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Theoretically possible, highly technical. Also, really expensive and it might make some people mad. Are there actual space junk claiming rules, like that of sea wrecks? I could see someone just going up and stealing/taking a classified satellite before it de-orbited.
There’s a great premise for a sci-fi novel - an earth where machinery falls from the sky on a perpetual basis, due to it being more advantageous to send new objects rather than repair/upgrade the existing ones. Groups of scavengers track these impacts to salvage pieces and build their own machinery.
I could see it as a subplot focused around high-value, highly durable items such as RTGs, though. A device that generates even a low level of electrical power without requiring fuel or favorable environmental conditions could easily have a broad range of uses in a post-apocalyptic story, and they are designed to survive reentry intact so as to avoid dispersing radioactive isotopes into the atmosphere or across the ground.
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12079880
Then it was only suspected, now it is headed in. One good solar flare to poof up the atmosphere and down it will come. I guess the Chinese figured you always burn up your first space station. (Skylab, Mir)